


Tin Soldiers

by Sholio



Series: Robot Jack AU [1]
Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Almost Human Fusion, Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Angst with a Happy Ending, Case Fic, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-15 17:03:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7231090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Detective Daniel Sousa is used to working with lifelike, human-looking androids. But he wasn't prepared for his new android partner turning out to be not a polite, compliant robot, but an angry, sarcastic, bitter <i>person.</i> (Technically this is a fusion with the show Almost Human, but no knowledge of it is required; this is really more like generic near-future police-state dystopia with robots.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tin Soldiers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pokolips](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pokolips/gifts).



> I've only seen a few episodes of Almost Human, so the main thing I've borrowed from it is "android cops" and a handful of worldbuilding details; therefore, this won't conform to the show exactly, and it should be completely comprehensible without ever having seen the show ... or either show, really, since it's a total AU.
> 
> Contains background Peggy/Jason and Angie/OFC.
> 
> Content note: this fic contains police violence and terrorism.
> 
> Huge thanks to my beta [sheron](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sheron) for encouragement and endless discussion of sad robots and how to make them not sad anymore.

The physician's assistant had just finished patching up Daniel's cuts and bruises -- it didn't take much, some quick passes with a skin-sealer and a few seconds to each bruise with an ultrasonic device to promote healing -- when the door of the exam room opened and Peggy barged in. She was dressed in street clothes rather than in uniform, so she'd come in from an assignment, and Daniel had a feeling she hadn't asked permission first, any more than she'd asked permission before opening the door. Daniel decided to consider himself lucky that he wasn't completely naked; he'd stripped down to his T-shirt, but at least he still had his pants on. Peggy's partner, a female-model CX unit, stopped in the doorway and smiled blandly while awaiting permission to enter. 

"Daniel, I just heard! Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. Just got banged around a little." He winced. "Chex is scrap, though. Dooley will hit the roof."

They were all in the habit of referring to their Synthetic partners by name. Some people liked to pick out a name; Peggy called hers Colleen. Other people just went with their series-model letters, which usually resulted in the CX and JX lines -- the most common police models -- being called Chex or Jax. The Synthetics were smart enough to recognize when "their" cop was referring to them by name, even if there were a dozen Chexes in the precinct.

"I'm considerably more worried about you than about Dooley's stress levels, to be honest." She looked over her shoulder. "Colleen, wait in the hall, please. I'll be out in a minute."

The CX model smiled politely and took a step back, settling into a resting pose out of the traffic flow of the hallway.

The physician's assistant set a small device against the worst of the bruising on Daniel's upper arm. Its tip glowed faintly blue. "Hold it there until the light goes off, sir, and then you can go. You'll find a painkiller prescription at the front desk."

Daniel nodded. The PA, a Synthetic itself, went off to see to other patients in the busy clinic. Daniel glanced down at his arm, and wished he hadn't; the bruises were still visible in the shape of Chex's inhumanly strong fingers, where his CX unit had grabbed him and thrown him out of the way of the bomb.

There hadn't been much left of it, afterwards ...

"I'm fine," he told Peggy, who was still hovering in concern. "My CX took the brunt of the blast, and I just got knocked down. Didn't even hurt the leg." He slapped the sophisticated cybernetic prosthesis under his pants leg.

"Yes, well, you'll excuse me for being a trifle anxious after I heard over the radio that a friend of mine was caught in a terrorist bombing." She hopped up on the exam bed beside him. Visible through the half-open doorway, Peggy's CX unit waited patiently. It wasn't completely mindless; if no further instructions came, it would eventually find someone to ask, or choose a course of action based on past experience and what its programming told it to do. For now, though, it waited in silence, able to see that its human partner had no current use for it.

"There weren't even any casualties, thanks to Chex. A little property damage --" Well, a lot of property damage, if you counted an expensive and sophisticated police robot. But this sort of thing was what they were _for._ "It was another backpack bomb, and the suspects were long gone by the time someone called it in."

"The Gloved Fist again?" Peggy asked. Of the various domestic terrorist groups plaguing the city, they'd been especially active lately, leaving backpacks of explosives in public areas.

"Dunno. Ask Li and Rowland; last I heard, they were chasing down witnesses." The blue light went off with a soft beep, and he shrugged back into his shirt, wincing at the pull of sore muscles. "Right now it's their problem. I just get to plow through all the inevitable paperwork."

"And you'll need to pick up a new partner unit."

"If they have any," Daniel pointed out. "With budget cuts, I might go on a waiting list." And might end up like Krzeminski, but he was trying not to think about that. Since human detectives no longer worked in pairs, a cop without a Synthetic partner worked alone, and Krzeminski had died in the line of duty a few weeks after he'd accidentally trashed his third CX and Dooley refused to assign him another.

"I'll put in a word with Jason," Peggy promised. She was dating a scientist at the facility that manufactured police-line Synthetics. "We'll find something for you, even if it's an older or discontinued model."

"Great, I'll be trusting my life to a recycling-bin refugee. This should end well."

 

***

 

It was two days before they could give Daniel a new partner. Dooley had been just as incensed about it as he'd feared ("Do you think million-dollar robots grow on trees, Sousa? Do you think we're made of money around here?") but they did apparently have an older-model Synthetic they could give him, once they got it out of mothballs. In the meantime, he tried not to think too hard about the empty passenger seat beside him in his cruiser. Chex hadn't been a person, he reminded himself. He hadn't _really_ lost a partner. Every other CX model in the field had the exact same personality module as Chex. They were interchangeable.

Still, he found himself having to avert his eyes from the other CX's in the precinct, haunted by the memory of Chex being ripped apart in front of his eyes. It was irrationally hard to see other Synthetics walking around with Chex's face, when he'd last seen Chex's face with its artificial skin peeled off and the underlying metal structure twisted and burnt.

_Chex wasn't a person. He saved a dozen people by taking the brunt of that bomb, but he didn't do it out of altruism or compassion. He did it because his programming told him that human lives need to be protected._

_Its, I mean. Its programming._

Everyone on the police force worked with a Synthetic partner. The androids served the function of everything from a mobile SWAT unit to an internet data link with sophisticated processing capability. And of course, in a firefight or other violent crisis, they were disposable in a way human officers weren't.

The first line of expressionless, robotic MX units had been replaced by a variety of newer-series Synthetics that were programmed with "appropriate emotional responses". These varied slightly between different personality modules, from one Synthetic series to another, but in general it meant that they smiled, laughed, looked sympathetic with a frightened witness, or assumed a stern expression while arresting someone. It had been found that the public responded better to a smiling Synthetic than to an expressionless, robotic one, or even to a human officer in many cases. Children in particular were less intimidated by a friendly robot than by a strange adult.

Whether or not Synthetics actually felt the emotions they were programmed to pretend to feel was a matter of debate around the precinct, as it was around the country right now. The standard line from the science boys was "no, of course not, it's a robot". It helped that they didn't have a full array of human emotions; at least the ones Daniel had worked most closely with, the CX's and JX's, didn't. They couldn't get angry, didn't get sad, didn't mind if they were parked in a corner and deactivated for a week.

But it was still hard not to anthropomorphize them. People talked to their toasters, for cryin' out loud; they named their cars and their phones. Of course if you spent twelve-hour shifts in a cruiser with a robot that looked and acted human, you were going to start fooling yourself into thinking its smiles were real. You'd catch yourself starting to ask it things like "So, got any plans for the weekend?" He'd done that with Chex a few times, not even thinking about it, though of course the answer was always, "I'll be in a recharge cycle in my usual closet, Daniel."

And he had to keep telling himself that Chex _hadn't_ given its life for him; it had only done what it was supposed to do. Its actions with the bomb weren't bravery, any more than a computer firewall was "brave" for keeping hackers at bay.

If only they didn't look so damn human.

Some people hated them because of that. Some refused to work with them at all. Others developed an unhealthy attachment to their Synthetics: poured out all their problems to them, took them home on weekends, maybe even had sex with them; who knew. It wasn't forbidden, as long as they didn't damage a piece of expensive hardware. It was just weird. There was no rule specifically telling you not to have sex with your patrol cruiser, either, or have long soulful conversations with it, but why would anyone _want_ to?

Daniel had tried a sexbot brothel exactly once. The robot had been a pretty young male unit, and Daniel had gotten to pick out exactly what he liked best in a guy (chiseled jaw, dark hair and eyes, freckles). But the actual experience had been so creepy that he hadn't even been able to finish. The robot made all the right noises, did all the right things, looked encouraging and aroused ... and that was the worst part. Either it wasn't feeling anything, in which case he might as well be sticking his dick into a port on his computer, or it _was_ feeling something that it didn't have a choice about feeling, in which case he was raping it. Either way, the whole experience had been appalling and he'd never gone back. He wasn't going to tell people not to do what they had a perfect legal right to do, and rationally, he trusted the scientists when they said that robots had no more ability to feel real feelings than the friendly-seeming scheduler on his phone that kept track of his calendar for him. But he was perfectly happy using his CX for its intended functions and trying to keep in mind that, however human it looked, it really wasn't, any more than his car was.

He wondered what they'd dug up for him. It wouldn't be a CX, unless it was a damaged one. It was probably going to be one of the experimental models; Stark Synthetics was always putting new lines on the street, only to recall them when something went wrong. Well, he'd already applied and gotten himself on the waiting list for a new CX when the department was able to replace his old one, so whatever hunk of junk they stuck him with would only have to last for a short while.

At the Stark Synthetics facility, he parked and a human receptionist directed him upstairs. He found Jason Wilkes in one of the labs. Jason gave him a friendly wave. "Detective Sousa, hi! Come on down to the morgue."

"Morgue?" Daniel asked as he followed Jason into an elevator.

"Oh, it's one of our macabre jokes around the office. Cold storage for Synthetics taken out of circulation."

"Yeah, I was meaning to ask about that. How much of a lemon am I going to get?"

The doors opened on a utilitarian corridor with cinderblock walls. Daniel had thought Jason was joking about the cold-storage part, but it actually was cooler down here than upstairs.

"We're giving you one of the last JK's," Jason said, leading him briskly past rows of closed doors. "They were rolled out along with the JX's as a heavier-duty companion to the light-duty unit."

"So they're a combat model?" Right now there were two primary series of Synthetics in use by the city's police, the all-purpose field CX's and the less combat-oriented JX's, which were used more for traffic patrol and support duties. The precinct also had a few SW's -- the ultra-heavy SWAT model -- along with a scattering of older types, budget knockoffs, and an experimental unit or two.

"They're built on an AI neural network that's a slightly more sophisticated version of the one we use in the JX, but they're more like the CX in terms of their combat capabilities." Jason found the door he wanted and swiped his finger on the biometric scanner to open it, but he paused in the doorway, turning around to explain. "We're still trying to perfect a balance between too-realistic emotional responses, as with the old DRN models, and the too-inflexible, entirely logic-based reasoning of the MX's and their like. What we're struggling with is trying to get that fuzzy, predictive decision making to function in a combat model. The CX's are all right -- they're not as good as the JX's for dealing with the public, and they don't learn fast, but they're useful in the field without being as unreliable as the JX's can be. The original idea was that the JX's and JK's would work together, picking up the slack for each other's weak areas, but the JK neural net turned out to be highly unpredictable and glitchy. That's why they were pulled."

"Doc, you're losing me."

Jason laughed. "Sorry. It's easy for me to get carried away. Come on, have a look at your new JK."

He led the way into a room that was empty except for the JK model clamped down on a worktable. It was dressed in a nondescript blue jumpsuit and its eyes were closed. There was a vague resemblance to the JX units in its general physical features. As always with a deactivated Synthetic, Daniel had to school himself not to respond as if it were a human corpse. It wasn't dead, and Jason was going to wake it up in a minute.

"When you say unreliable and glitchy, how exactly do you mean?" Daniel asked, studying the face of the deactivated robot.

"That's just the thing, it's different from one individual unit to another. They absorb information too fast, which makes them respond to stimuli in unpredictable ways. We have that problem to some extent with the JX's, but since their neural structure is more stable and they mainly interact with humans in a relaxed setting, it's more of a help than a problem. It makes them appear to have individual personalities, and people like that. In fact, we've been able to use the same system architecture in receptionist and clerk models to provide a better end-user experience for --"

"Doc ..."

"And there I go again." Jason popped free a power plug from the neck of the deactivated JK. "Well, suffice it to say, the JK's were hard to work with and prone to problems, so the line was recalled. If you have too many problems with this one, there is a solution, which is a hard wipe followed by remapping the neural net with JX programming. This has been done with some JK models in the past and, while it's not a perfect solution, they did work somewhat better with fewer complaints."

"But I'd be stuck with a unit that doesn't have any combat programming, wouldn't I?"

Jason ran a scanner over the JK's blond hair, speaking without looking up while watching the screen. "Well, it's not that the JX's can't do combat at all, just that they aren't as good at it as the CX's or JK's. But yeah, I'm warning you in advance that this unit going to be glitchy, and the more you use it the glitchier it'll get, so you are probably looking at a wipe-and-reformat eventually."

"Good to know." Hopefully he'd have his new CX by then. "How long will it take to bring it online?"

"Looks like it's about booted up. It's been powered down for awhile, so we wanted to run a full system check before bringing up the conscious functions." He examined the screen, tapping as he scrolled through the resulting information. "Hmmm."

"What does 'hmm' mean?" Daniel asked with a nervous glance at the JK unit. "And is there a reason it's fastened down?"

"Oh, that's just because they can have reflex responses during testing," Jason said absently. "No one wants to get hit in the face with a fist capable of punching through a brick wall." He shook his head and tapped off the screen. "Well, you might be bringing it back for a reset sooner than I thought. It looks like there was a lot of network degradation during its last activity cycle. This really isn't matching the factory standards at all. Now, with all AI's we expect _some_ deviations, because they _do_ learn and so their neural patterns are always going to deviate from the baseline, but it looks like this one's even more defective than most of its line." He glanced down at the defunct JK. "If you're not comfortable, I can have it wiped and reformatted, and do a fresh install. It'll take a few hours, though."

Daniel thought about it, and shook his head. He knew from working with the CX models that they did "learn" in the field, albeit slowly, and the more experience they had, the better they were able to anticipate and handle new situations. "I'll stick with this one for now. I can always come back and have you do the, uh, reformatting thing if it turns out to be too glitchy."

"Fair enough. If you need to force a shutdown, the kill command is --" Jason checked his screen. "-- its series line and number followed by 'little green apples.'" He picked up a small tool and reached behind the JK's ear. "Kill switch is back here. And now, let's get this show on the road."

He did something with the tool and then stepped back. The JK jerked and gasped, looking very much like a human suddenly waking up. It never stopped being weird, Daniel thought. The human hindbrain couldn't cope with something that looked so human and yet wasn't; he never stopped wanting to respond to them that way.

The JK's eyes fluttered open. It lay still for a moment, gazing at the ceiling, exactly like a human awakened suddenly from sleep. After a moment it moved slowly, started to sit up and then fell back down when it realized it was restrained.

"Restraints? Seriously?"

Daniel jumped a little. He'd expected, somehow, the JK's voice to be gravelly and dazed, like a human waking up from a deep sleep. But of course it sounded normal; it had booted up fully, and its vocal simulators were in full operation. Again, he had to remind himself that any emotion in its voice was put there to provoke a response, not because it actually felt anything. It sounded surprised, hurt, a little angry -- exactly like a human in the same position.

"It's a necessary precaution when bringing you online," Jason said. He thumbed a biometric strip on top of each of the cuffs, and they retracted. Beneath the cuffs, the slender blue bracelets that marked the JK unit as an android belonging to the police department glimmered, inset into the synthetic skin of its wrists.

The JK sat up gracefully. It looked down at itself, at the jumpsuit, and then raised its head and its face smoothed out into the calm expression of a Synthetic awaiting instructions. "What year is it?" it asked.

Daniel watched, intrigued. The CX models wouldn't be asking questions. At least, he didn't remember that with his last one. It just sat up and waited to be given orders.

"2062," Jason answered. He was doing a few more scans, running a scanner over its limbs.

"Five years," the JK said. It blinked slowly, long lashes flicking over hazel eyes. "I didn't expect to wake up at all."

"Surprise," Jason said dryly. "You've been recommissioned. This is your partner, Detective Daniel Sousa. Daniel, hold out your hand so JK-1070 can record your biometrics."

Daniel held out a hand. The JK looked at him for a moment before taking his fingers in a hard, impersonal grip. Its skin was warm, a little warmer than human normal, same as the CX's that he'd touched in the past.

This close, its eyes seemed to glitter with an intensity that Daniel hadn't seen in a Synthetic before. Its face was blank and calm, but there was still emotion in its eyes. It made him uncomfortable. He had to look away, down at their joined hands, where tiny blue flickers of light were visible beneath the artificial skin.

"And ... done!" Jason said. "Detective, can you sign here?"

Daniel obligingly pressed his thumb to the tablet. "We're good to go?"

"You're good to go. Call me if you have problems, or if you decide to order a reset once you've had a day or two to see its performance in the field."

Daniel couldn't help glancing at the JK-1070. Talking about resetting it in _front_ of it ... okay, it didn't matter, it wasn't like the unit itself would care, but it still felt weird. The JK was looking straight ahead with that glitter in its eyes and its face perfectly blank.

"Come on," Daniel said.

The JK unit slid down from the worktable. 

"Say hi to Peggy for me," Jason said, turning to clean up the tools spread out behind the table.

"Will do. Thanks for rustling this up on short notice, man."

The door fell shut behind them. The JK's body language seemed to change slightly; it straightened a bit, holding itself more erect. As they walked to the elevators, Daniel found himself measuring the new JK against the old CX. It was a little taller, and carried itself in a way that he could only think of as _more human_ \-- it still seemed a bit stiff, but there was more movement in every line of its body. More body language, for lack of a better way to put it.

While they waited for the elevator, it looked at him with its cool glittering eyes and said, unprompted, "So they give me half a cop to work with? I'd almost rather go back in cold storage."

"I'm sorry?" Daniel said, shocked down to his core. He'd worked with Synthetics for his entire career, and dealt with them at various places of business, and in all that time, he'd never met one that was anything less than scrupulously polite to humans. He hadn't even realized they _had_ another setting.

"You're a cyborg," the JK said. "The least they could've done was assign me a functional human. This is insulting."

It took him a moment to catch onto what the JK was talking about. He tended to forget about the leg a lot of the time these days; he was so used to it that he tuned out the minor discomfort except under certain conditions -- if he had to run, say, or while he was doing routine maintenance at home. It wasn't a perfect replacement for the one he'd lost, but it was as good as modern medicine could do, and that was pretty good.

But still ... what the _hell._ A Synthetic that didn't like people with artificial limbs? Was that even a thing? It must be some kind of crappy joke, some random bit of code that a wannabe jokester had stuck into the JK's programming during its last tour of duty.

While he was still trying to figure out how to respond -- it was like he'd booted up a computer and it had greeted him with personal insults -- the elevator doors opened and the Synthetic stepped inside. Daniel hastily followed. He didn't like how much initiative it was showing, but Jason _had_ warned him it'd be glitchy, so he tried to smooth over the awkwardness and carry on as he would with a normal CX. "So, we're going out to my car and I'll drive you down to the precinct. It's evening, so you can get in one of the precinct service bays for your regular recharge cycle."

"I just woke up," the JK said. "I'm fully charged. I'll spend the time loading my memory banks with everything I've missed in the last five years instead."

The doors opened on the ground floor. As the Synthetic started to step out, Daniel put out a hand, holding the doors and stopping the Synthetic from moving forward. "Look, you know I'm in charge here, right? I don't know if you're stuck in some memory loop from a past case, but I'm your new partner, and you're supposed to do what I tell you."

"I don't like taking orders from a human who's hardly more fit to be called one than I am."

"Okay, yeah, no; knock it _off,"_ Daniel snapped. For a moment he thought it might just walk through him; it was strong enough to easily shove him aside. The shutdown phrase hovered on his tongue: _Little green apples._ But it didn't move forward, or fling him out of the way; it just stared at him with those bright, angry eyes.

Anger ... from a Synthetic. Or at least something that sure as hell looked like it. _What IS this?_ Daniel wondered, and for a moment he really was scared. They weren't kidding about this thing being glitchy and unpredictable. He could change his mind, walk back into the lab, and tell Jason to reformat it. Maybe he should.

But it felt like losing a fight with a Roomba. He wasn't about to back down. "Are you fully functional?" he asked. "That is, do you function well enough to go out in the field?"

"I'm perfectly functional. Are you?"

"Son of a --" He stopped and took a deep breath. "Stand down and cut out the insults, or I'll turn you off."

The JK narrowed its eyes at him and took a step backward. Its face smoothed out ... alarmingly so, it seemed to Daniel, as if it had turned off whatever aberrant emotions it had just been expressing. But of course, it was a robot; it could do that. "Of course you can," it said. "You can always do that. Are we going to the car now, boss?"

"Yeah, it's in the parking garage. This way." He started to lead the way, then let it fall into step beside him. He didn't quite feel comfortable having it at his back. _This is going to be a fun partnership. Even if it's a temporary one._ "And you don't have to call me that. Just call me Daniel."

He'd always had his CX's call him Daniel. Most of the detectives had their Synthetics address them by name; the ones who demanded polite forms of address from their Synthetics were usually power-tripping assholes. 

And he was going to need to call the JK something. With Chex, the CX he'd worked with by far the longest, he'd just said, "So, I'll call you Chex, all right?" and Chex had smiled and said, "Certainly, Daniel." But walking down the the hallway, a few feet from a tense Synthetic that might be suffering from some kind of dangerous mental breakdown, Daniel couldn't quite bring himself to be that cavalier. 

"Do you have a name?" he asked. "Something your last partner used to call you?"

The corner of the JK's mouth turned up in something that looked like a smile programmed by someone who didn't quite understand how human expressions worked. "Do you name your microwave and your car?" There was something like a sneer in its tone.

Okay, there was no doubt about it: some programmer jerk fucked up with this one. Jason had said the JK's mental patterns were off, and while Daniel didn't know enough about programming to know what that meant, he did know from working with the CX units that it was possible to upload new modules and expansion packs for their memory -- adding new languages, for example, or new skills. The thing that made the most sense here was that all the insults and its weird, insubordinate behavior had something to do with a job the JK had been working on before it was decommissioned. It might have been doing undercover work in a bad neighborhood, or something like that. And nobody bothered to get rid of the insult routines. Sloppy.

And it didn't help at all that the physical type of the JK line was uncomfortably reminiscent of the exact sort of guys who were totally out of Daniel's league, the hot blond gym rats who'd rather kick Daniel's geeky ass to the curb than look at him twice. His robot didn't just sound like an asshole; it _looked_ like an asshole.

In any case, he still had to call it something. "Your series letters are JK, so you were probably Jack. Otherwise it's going to have to be 'hey you'."

"Whatever floats your boat." Newly-named Jack raised a hand and the car door opened before they got there. The JK made a little flourish, like a magician performing a trick.

"Now you're interfacing with my car?" Daniel said in disbelief. He slid into the driver's seat before the damn Synthetic could decide to take over the driving too.

"I'm being helpful."

"The hell you are," Daniel muttered. He tapped the precinct route and the car pulled out smoothly.

"Hold on," the JK said. "You can't expect me to go out in public dressed like this."

"Like what?" Daniel asked, looking over at him. He was wearing the standard factory-issue jumpsuit. They all started out wearing that.

"I look like a prison inmate."

"You look like a _robot._ Which is what you _are."_

Jack placed a hand on the dashboard. The car veered out of the traffic on the freeway and pulled over into an emergency parking area.

"What -- are you talking to my car again? Fuck this!" Daniel rarely swore, but _what the hell._ "We're going to the precinct."

"I think it reflects badly on you to show up to your place of work with an underdressed _robot."_ Jack looked at him flatly, laying a cold emphasis on the last word.

What he ought to do right now was just drive the goddamn uncooperative thing to the precinct, blue jumpsuit and all. Or ... no ... he should turn around and go back to Stark Synthetics and have it reformatted, because whatever was going on here, it was dangerous. No kidding this thing was going to be unpredictable in the field. At the rate things were going, Jack was either going to get Daniel shot, or shoot him itself.

But officers did get a clothing allowance for their Synthetics -- which he still had most of, since Chex had rarely needed to replace anything, aside from that one time he carelessly got himself _blown up._

And Daniel was curious. He couldn't help it. Curiosity was a large part of what had made him want to be a cop. Mysteries drew him, and right now this rude, recalcitrant robot was one gigantic mystery.

"We'll hit a clothing store and _then_ I'll drop you off at the precinct. Happy?"

To his surprise, Jack nearly smiled -- just a quick, almost invisible tug of his lips, and a slight crinkling around the eyes.

Daniel revised his opinion of the unknown programmer slightly. It did a decent job at simulating subtle emotions. Too bad the JK-1070 was apparently as unstable as a teeter-totter in a windstorm.

And that little smile made him feel good, for some reason. Synthetics couldn't even _be_ happy (or sad, or angry, or anything else) but the emotional part of his brain still responded warmly to having one smile at him.

Which of course was why Synthetics smiled in the first place. And it was the only reason: for humans' benefit, because the humans who programmed them thought they ought to.

There was no other reason. Why would there be?

 

***

 

"So, I have a new partner," Daniel announced, sliding onto a bar stool beside Peggy at their favorite after-hours watering hole.

"And?" she asked, glancing at him sideways.

"And my new robot is an asshole."

Peggy choked on her drink, trying not to laugh. "Poor dear," she said, patting his arm.

"No, seriously. I can see why they decommissioned him. What I can't figure out right now is why they didn't _recycle_ him. He's got the worst personality of any Synthetic I've ever worked with."

"What series?"

"JK," Daniel said glumly, motioning for a drink. "Ever worked with one?"

"I can't say I have. They're the combat model of the JX, aren't they?"

"Yeah, but I'd take a JX in a heartbeat over this. Heck, I'd take some kid's android nanny over this. At least it wouldn't insult me all the time."

Now she was definitely laughing at him, her eyes sparkling with mirth. "How rude must you be to make a Synthetic insult you?"

"I'm not the rude one! There's something wrong with this thing. I'll probably take it back in a couple of days and get it reformatted. Jason said he can do that."

His drink arrived, brought by a human bartender. Peggy, still smiling at his pain, tapped her glass and nodded to the bartender for another. "Where is your new partner now?"

"Precinct. He's -- it's spending its down cycle updating its memory banks with recent news and whatever else a defective Synthetic needs to know about. _After_ it made me buy it a whole new wardrobe," he muttered. And it had been damn picky about what it wanted. Chex never cared; Chex would probably have been just as happy to run around naked. What kinds of cases had they been sending the JK-1070 on five years ago, anyway?

"Daniel ..." She leaned closer and laid her hand on his arm. "As hilarious as all of this is -- and you should have seen your face; it really is funny -- you shouldn't take the JK out in the field if you think it's unsafe. I can talk to Jason in the morning, and he can reset it, or find you another one."

Daniel thought about it, then shook his head. "I hate to go back less than a day later and tell them I can't deal with it. He told me up front that it'd be glitchy; I just didn't realize that 'glitchy' translated to basically being the robot equivalent of a prick. Let me at least see how it performs in the field first."

"I won't argue, but at least promise me you won't let macho pride override your safety."

"Believe me, no one is more invested in my safety than I am." Peggy's freshly topped-up Scotch had arrived, so he held up his beer. "To my new partner, the robot prick."

Peggy grinned and clinked her glass against the beer bottle.

 

***

 

Over the next few days, Daniel kinda-halfway meant to get around to taking Jack in to get him looked at, scanned, and possibly reformatted, but there was just too much to do. So he ended up spending most of his time in forced proximity to his brand new asshole-robot partner.

He quickly learned that Jack liked being busy -- well, for robotic values of "like", which mostly meant that a busy Jack with lots to do was a Jack who was too preoccupied to insult him. And Jack turned out to be much better at data analysis than Chex had been, which was a good incentive to give him a bunch of case files and/or evidence, and see what he could do with them while also keeping him too busy to be annoying for an hour or two.

Daniel wasn't the only person Jack was rude to, although mostly it seemed to be in a casual "I am all out of fucks to give" kind of way, as opposed to going out of his way to be _mean._ And there were a few people he was perfectly polite to. Chief Dooley, for example, and any technicians he happened to come into contact with. He hadn't been rude to Jason Wilkes either, Daniel thought, reflecting back on it. Of course, Jason had also been holding an electromagnetic doohickey that could shut him down with a single tap.

It was like he had the capability to figure out which people in the office could _really_ get him in trouble -- who could order him decommissioned, who could turn him off with the push of a button.

Daniel would've thought simple self-preservation would dictate that Jack's partner would be one of those, but apparently not. He seemed to personally have it in for Daniel, and Daniel had no idea why. 

Besides, he had to keep reminding himself that it wasn't possible for a robot to "have it in" for anybody. What looked like an incredibly petty and pointless grudge actually must have some underlying computer logic behind it; he just didn't know enough about programming to understand why.

It was starting to make him the butt of the office jokes, though. "Hey, Sousa, your Synth give you a wedgie today?"

"Fuck off, Li."

During one of those exchanges, he happened to look up and noticed Jack listening. Jack was scanning the RFID tags on a pile of knockoff electronics, at an unused desk in the corner since (being a Synthetic) he obviously did not have a desk of his own. He was listening, and he was smiling a little, with a glint of cold satisfaction in his eyes. He looked away when he saw Daniel watching him.

_What the utter blue fuck._

Daniel had never met a Synthetic who was so incredibly hard to dismiss as a machine. He _knew_ it was programming, it was all just pre-written reactions and responses, it was _fake._ There was a small conspiracy-theory part of him that would've wondered if Jack might not even be a human undercover for some reason, except he'd seen Jack plugged in on the table at Stark Synthetics, and he sometimes saw the blue spark of electrical impulses racing under Jack's plastic skin. So there had to be a reason for all of this; it had to be the result of something that had been programmed into him. "Undercover subroutines run amok" and "his previous human partner was an asshole practical joker" were Daniel's two main theories.

Taking Jack into the field made him nervous for a number of reasons, not the least being that he had no idea how Jack's general air of "humans suck and I hate all of them" was going to go down in a crowd. However, as they wandered around a street of small shops running down clues on the electronics used in last week's bombing, Jack wasn't too different from a CX, with a general air of alert observance. No CX walked with that slight swagger, though. There were times when Daniel saw him go entirely still, in an inhuman way, but for the most part his body language was indistinguishable from that of a human, especially in the nicely tailored suit he'd picked out, which showed off the trim lines of his body. He didn't look like an android _or_ a cop. Daniel was starting to see where the programmers had been going with the JK line, although somehow they seemed to have taken an accidental left turn into "asshole" along the way.

However, Jack was good at talking to people, when he wanted to be -- much more so than a typical CX, and probably more so than two-thirds of the officers in the precinct, Daniel included. Daniel ended up standing back and letting Jack do most of the talking, showing his badge only as necessary. Jack was mildly flirty when talking to most women, or interested men; Daniel saw more than one person do a double take and go into a startled huff when they noticed the blue bands around his wrists -- normally all but invisible under his cuffs, but peeking into view when he shook hands or, in one case, raised the back of a female salesclerk's hand playfully to his lips. Noticing the blue cuff, she yanked her hand back as if she'd been burned and turned on Daniel. "You really shouldn't let it run around playing human like that," she snapped. "How rude! I bet you were filming me making an ass of myself for one of those reality feeds, weren't you?"

"Ma'am, we're the police, and we need to ask you some questions," Daniel said, more gruffly than necessary because he hadn't been able to avoid noticing a flash of something that looked very much like hurt on Jack's face before it was covered up by a supercilious sneer. Jack wandered off to examine the merchandise on the walls while Daniel finished the questioning.

Back out on the street, he felt an irrational urge to apologize. _You know they don't actually feel anything,_ he told himself, but he was starting to wonder if that was true of Jack. It had definitely been true of Chex; Daniel had watched his Synthetic partner shrug off all manner of insults, and had even asked a couple of times if it bothered him. "I don't feel 'bother', Daniel," the Synthetic had said. "It's only words. The emotional reactions that humans experience in such situations are incomprehensible to me."

And anyway, if it still bothered Jack, it didn't show; he was back to swaggering casually along, scanning the street with an air of cool interest. Still, Daniel felt like he ought to say something.

"She was kind of a jerk, huh?" he tried.

"Who, the one back in the phone store?" Jack smiled lopsidedly. Of everything his programmers had done well on the JK models, they hadn't gotten his smile right, Daniel thought. Like every other Synthetic Daniel had ever seen, it was a movement of the mouth only, not something that properly touched the eyes and the entire face like a human smile did.

But then he had a quick, uncomfortable flash of that near-smile in the car the first afternoon, when almost, just for an instant, it actually had ...

"No, she's honest," Jack went on, still wearing his plastic smile. "She just says what everyone else is thinking. When it comes right down to it, that's easier to deal with."

And wasn't _that_ just about the most depressing thing Daniel had heard all day. "Well, yeah, but --" he began, when Jack grabbed him and flung him headfirst into a rack of recycling containers.

The whole stack came down on him in a cascade of old coffee grounds, banana peels, and plastic bottles, and it wasn't until he started to struggle out from under the trash-a-lanche that he realized it had been more than a sudden violent commentary on the conversation. The crowd in the street had begun flinging themselves to the ground, Jack had crouched next to him with gun drawn, and someone at the far end of the street was shooting at them. 

"You okay?" Daniel asked, without thinking about it, as he fumbled at his slimy holster for his gun.

"Who cares; I'm an android," Jack shot back. "You blew up your last one, so don't pretend _you_ care."

 _Oh._ Suddenly, some of Jack's hostility started to make more sense. It still didn't explain why he was manifesting hostility in the first place, in spite of theoretically not being able to feel it, but that was above Daniel's pay grade. At least he finally had a sort of explanation.

Although ... no ... Jack's antagonism had started before he could have learned what had happened to Daniel's last partner.

And now was not the time to wonder about it, because they also had a suspect who was getting away. "Police!" Daniel shouted down the street, and the shooter, who had already started running, jinked left and ducked down an alley.

Without speaking, Jack sprang to his feet and took off after him, running inhumanly fast.

"Hey!" Daniel yelled after him. "Wait for orders, damn it!"

No answer. Jack vanished down the alley.

Daniel clambered out of the spilled garbage, shaking as much of it as possible off him. "Police," he called. "Is anybody hurt?"

"No thanks to you," an elderly woman snapped as a man of equivalent age helped her to her feet. "It was you they was after. We'd all be safer if you wasn't around."

He let that go and moved down the street, gun lowered at his side but still in his hand, scanning rooftops and storefronts. He saw no sign of any other shooters, but felt horribly exposed as he waved civilians to safety under the holographic signs and awnings of the shopping district, helping up those who were having trouble getting up on their own.

There was a flash of motion and Daniel spun around with his gun drawn as Jack landed lightly in the middle of the street, having apparently jumped from one of the three- and four-story roofs in the vicinity. "Human reflexes," Jack said in disgust as Daniel lowered the gun. "Bastard got away. It's like a warren back there. Nothing to trail."

Daniel nodded, looking up at the tenements rising behind the shops. Like many of the poorer neighborhoods in the sprawling city, this area had a number of abandoned buildings, lots of substandard housing, and ready access to the sewers. The buildings were riddled with jury-rigged escape tunnels, secret rooms, and booby traps. It was a maze into which the cops didn't venture often.

... or, more accurately, they sent androids or drones, when necessary. Something that could be damaged without costing a life.

Daniel plucked a scrap of orange peel from behind his ear and wiped the gun on his leg before holstering it. "All that split-second data processing, and you couldn't have thrown me into the rug shop next door?"

"More fun this way," Jack said, smirking.

Daniel had, over time, gotten out of the habit of using polite niceties with Chex, since Chex didn't expect them or feel any emotional appreciation for being thanked or apologized to. In this case, though ... "Thanks for the save."

Jack looked like he was on the verge of saying something, probably an insult, when cruisers with flashing lights began to pull into the street. The city's security-camera network would have alerted them to shots fired with officers present. With the shooter gone, though, it was all going to be legwork -- interviewing witnesses and filling out forms -- for the rest of the afternoon. Probably dealing with reporters too.

And he got to do it while covered in garbage. Wonderful.

The lead cruiser pulled up alongside Daniel, and Peggy hopped out. Her CX partner Colleen moved with her, shadowing and covering her. "Daniel --" she began, then stopped and took a step backward, choking with laughter.

"Yes, I'm fine, thanks for asking." Daniel untangled a strand of sticky film from one arm, trying not to think about what it might have been wrapped around.

"One of these nice local entrepreneurs must have a hose," Peggy said, keeping her distance. Then she took a second look at Jack, and Daniel saw recognition click in her eyes; she must have dismissed him as a bystander at first. Peggy and Colleen had been working long hours in the field, so she hadn't met his new partner yet.

"Detective Margaret Carter," Jack said, traces of blue light flickering in his eyes as he scanned her. He ignored Colleen completely. He did that at the station as well, walking past the CX's and JX's as if they were furniture.

"It's Peggy, please. You must be JK-1070."

"Who just saved my ass," Daniel said. He wasn't sure why; he just felt like Jack should get recognition for it, even if Jack had only been acting as his programming compelled him.

"By covering it in rubbish," Peggy said. Her eyes sparkled. "Nice work, 1070. I have often had the urge to push my male colleagues into the rubbish bins, so I can relate."

"Protect and serve," Jack said, and Daniel wondered if the note of dry humor was only his imagination. "It's my programming, Marge."

A slight frown drew her brows together. "Call me Peggy, I said."

"Awww, Carter, you must not've had the displeasure of running into Sousa's JK unit yet," Detective Rowland remarked, debarking from another of the police vehicles that had pulled in behind hers. "Whoever wrote his personality module was an idiot and a troll, but an entertaining troll. I'd like to buy the guy a drink someday." He slapped Jack on the back. Jack didn't budge, but gave him an expressionless look. "Hey, JK, insult somebody, give her a show."

"Do I look like a sideshow exhibit to you?" Jack asked, his voice flat with a hint of snarl in it. "Fucking ape."

Rowland laughed. "Better you than me, buddy," he told Daniel, patting him on the shoulder before he strode off toward the crime scene. His CX went with him, keeping pace a step behind. It was a little alarming to Daniel to realize that he hardly even noticed them anymore; they were just _there,_ like a cop's holster and gun.

Peggy was looking speculatively at Jack, but someone else pulled her away to ask her a question before she could say anything else. Colleen followed her, and then it was just the two of them, standing beside the car. Daniel felt like he should say something -- actually, he felt like apologizing for Rowland, even though it wasn't like anything new or different had happened ... even though there was no reason to apologize to an android. But he still wanted to.

"Hey," he said instead, on impulse. "There's a bar near the station where the local cops hang out off duty. You want to come with us for drinks tonight?"

Jack gave him a long, unreadable look, his face as blank as that of a CX, before he said, "Why not. Haven't got anything else planned."

 

***

 

Most people didn't bring their Synthetics for after-hours socializing -- there wasn't really much point -- but some did, usually those who had bonded with them to a probably-not-psychologically-healthy degree. Peggy had brought in Colleen a few times, though it was obvious that the CX unit had no more interest in socializing than in anything else. Colleen sat politely, smiling and occasionally sipping a drink (they were capable of ingesting small amounts of food and drink for social purposes, stored in a reservoir), and providing information if requested -- they often used the nearly CX's to look up case details, do some quick math, or answer other questions that came up -- while otherwise gazing at the crowd with her usual alert in-the-field-and-on-duty attitude.

To Daniel's discomfort, Jack started out the evening doing exactly that. Stiff, straight-backed, and polite, he might as well have been a CX. When Detective Yauch asked him to calculate the tip on last week's overdue bar tab, as he might have done with Colleen, Jack reported it without inflection or sarcasm. It was downright creepy.

Daniel ordered him a drink because it felt strange if one member of their party was sitting there not drinking when everyone else was. Jack sipped at it occasionally, or rather, brushed his lips to it; the level barely went down.

"Do you taste things?" Daniel asked, suddenly curious.

Jack turned his head. He'd been behaving like any CX, gazing off into the distance and answering only when spoken to; now his gaze sharpened. "I can analyze the chemical content of a sample."

"Yeah, but is that the same thing as tasting it?" It was a genuine question; he wanted to know. "If that question even makes sense. I know it's vague."

"That's all you humans are doing when you taste something. Your chemical analysis is less sophisticated, that's all, and it's mainly aimed at avoiding poisons and determining whether the solids and liquids you take in contain the nutrients your metabolism needs at the moment."

"Trust a Synthetic to make eating sound absolutely disgusting," Vega said with a laugh, overhearing. "Or at least boring as hell." 

Peggy had been chatting idly with Yauch; now she looked around curiously. There were about a half-dozen detectives at their corner table tonight, plus Jack. "He's not wrong, though," she pointed out.

"Your brain gives you a chemical reward when you take in sugars and fats," Jack said. He seemed to be enjoying having their attention on him, but there was something tense about him that was making Daniel even more nervous than the flat lack of affect earlier. "And alcohol dumps dopamine into your bloodstream. It's a simple stimulus-reward circuit."

"Sugars and fats," Rowland reported, pointing to the beer in his hand. There was a round of laughter at the table; Peggy dutifully smiled. "Tastes damn good."

Jack's lips curved in a faint, sardonic smile that came nowhere near his eyes. "You say things 'taste good', but it's just your brain giving you a chemical kick. You're not actually feeling anything, just being tricked by your brain. What you call emotions are a chemistry-driven evolutionary con game. You're as mechanical as I am deep down, just a bunch of wetware chemically-run machines."

"Okay, Sousa, what the _hell,"_ Li said. "Does your Synthetic come with a wet-blanket party-killer circuit?"

"You gave it too much and got it drunk," Rowland said, laughing.

"I'm answering the question," Jack said with a bright, brittle cheerfulness. "That's what we're for, right? Looking things up when you're too lazy to use your phone."

"Can you get me the score for the Dodgers game, then?" Rowland asked flippantly. "I'm missing it to hang out with you losers."

There were a few nervous chuckles that died when Jack said, "Look it up yourself, you lazy fuck."

"Jack," Daniel said, low. "Settle down."

"I'm a multimillion-dollar piece of hardware, not Google. Anyone else got a question for me? Anyone have some pressing gap in your knowledge about androids you just have to resolve?" His withering, scornful smile swept the table, including Daniel. "I'm anatomically correct, in case any of you wanted to know. Everyone always wonders about that, but they're too embarrassed to ask. So there's a freebie."

The silence at the table was now deeply awkward. "Jack, knock it off," Daniel tried again, more sharply this time. He touched the tip of his tongue to the back of his teeth, remembering the kill phrase, but it seemed like overkill to use it just because Jack was acting out in a bar. Still, the awareness floated through the back of his mind that Jack was glitchy. Unpredictable. A violent incident should be against his programming, but did that apply to a Synthetic with buggy code?

"Yeah, you know what? It probably is time to pack it in and go recharge for the night." Jack swept his twisted smile around the table again, and knocked back the glass of bourbon that Daniel had ordered for him in a single swallow. "You know what happens to that, by the way?" he asked, setting down the glass with a click that sounded loud in the silence at their table. "It goes into a little reservoir, so I can pretend to eat and drink with you humans. I take it out and empty it later. Humans don't like watching that. My old partner told me it makes you sympathetically ill. Another thing I don't have to worry about: throwing up. Sympathetically or otherwise. Actually, sympathy isn't much of a problem either. No emotions, right?" He pushed his chair out and stepped away from the table. "Have an absolutely wonderful night."

As he strode away, there was a brief, stunned moment before Rowland said, "Christ, Sousa, who programmed that thing, a machine-rights nutjob on a drug high?"

"You really know how to escalate a situation, Rowland," Daniel said. He got up, abandoning his half-finished beer, and went after Jack.

There was no sign of him on the street outside, but the alley behind the bar was a shortcut to the police station, and Daniel got lucky there. He had to run to catch up.

"What the hell was all that in there?" he demanded, panting slightly from the effort of matching Jack's fast stride. "If you keep it up, they're going to wipe you and install a personality that's less of an asshole, you know that?"

Jack stopped so suddenly that Daniel almost bumped into him. He spun around, his eyes sharp and bright with something that was either anger or a damned convincing facsimile. "They're going to anyway, aren't they?"

Daniel felt like the breath had been punched out of him.

" _You're_ going to," Jack added. "All arranged, is it?"

Daniel thought back to that first conversation Jack had overheard with Jason, waking up out of shutdown to hear two people discussing ... well, killing him, effectively. The idea of Jack being wiped away, replaced with a complacent personality like Colleen's -- a vacant smile on those hard, angry features -- filled him with sudden revulsion. "No," he said. "Not if I have anything to say about it."

"Oh come now." Jack's smile was cruel, his eyes like flint. "That's what you want, isn't it? You're on the waiting list for a nice CX like the one your friends have. Just like buying a new car to replace one that got in a wreck." His eyes flicked down at Daniel's right leg, hidden under the leg of his pants. "Or a nice synthetic replacement for a limb that got blown off. All interchangeable."

Jack had to have looked him up. The Synthetics had access to all but the most classified parts of the police network ... and possibly even those. Why not? They were machines, objective and incorruptible. So he'd looked up his new partner and found out Daniel was on the CX wait list, learned what happened to his previous partner, and probably everything else about Daniel's career going back to the early days.

Did they all do that? Was it part of their protocols when they were assigned to a new partner? Daniel didn't think so -- why _would_ they, when everything they needed to know was what they were told to do? But Jack had gone and researched him, exactly like a human would have researched the new situation they found themselves in.

"Jack, I swear to you," he said, the conviction building in him as he said it. "You're not going to be erased. I'll go to bat to keep it from happening. But _you_ have to stop going out of your way to piss people off or I might not be able to do anything about it, all right?"

Jack tilted his head to the side. "I don't believe you," he said. His voice was soft and fierce. "You're either trying to fool me or yourself. If you could have a friendly, compliant robot buddy like the rest of your cop friends, why would you want to be saddled with --" He jerked a hand, a hard choppy gesture indicating himself. "-- _this?"_

Why indeed. A question which he had, in fact, asked himself over the last few days, too. Actually it was more along the lines of _What did I do to deserve this?_

But if he allowed himself to entertain the impossible ... if he told himself, for just this one moment, to think about what it _would_ be like to have full self-awareness and yet still be stuck in a system that considered you legally and morally equivalent to a computerized toaster ... anger was not only a completely rational response, but it made him wonder if he would have been as comparatively reasonable about it as Jack had been, in the same situation. Jack was rude and insubordinate, but he did his job -- all of it, from solving cases to saving Daniel's life.

Granted, the latter had been due to his "protect human life" programming; he couldn't _not._ But he'd still done it. And the thought of Jack's defiance and determination being wiped away, over his protests and against his will, made Daniel feel ill. How could something like that be anything other than morally repugnant?

"I'd take you over one of those smiling morons any day," he said. "Maybe it's like you said earlier, about the woman in the shop -- I'd rather have someone be honest with me. Or maybe it's just ..." He shrugged and smiled. "Humans are irrational. Even we don't know why we do half the things we do."

Jack stared at him, his expression completely unreadable. Then he turned on his heel and walked away.

For a minute or two there, Daniel had thought Jack might hit him, and Jack was strong enough to punch his spleen out through his spine. But that wasn't what made him sink against the wall of the alley, trying to ignore the fact that it felt slightly sticky. He felt like his emotions had been run over with a tractor, and he wasn't even sure why.

He was still leaning there when Peggy's shadow fell across the mouth of the alley. "Daniel?" 

"Down here," he called back.

She picked her way through the garbage to him, one hand on her gun. "Do you simply _enjoy_ being covered with rubbish? Isn't once in a single day enough?"

"It grows on you." He peeled himself off the wall, wincing. "Sorry about the scene back there."

"If JK-1070 were a human, I would ask if he's all right. That's not a question you typically ask a Synthetic. But I've never seen a Synthetic storm out of a bar before, either."

"Me neither." He hesitated, hardly able to voice what he was thinking -- the impossible things he was thinking. "The JK's aren't anything like the CX's, are they?" was what he finally went with.

"It appears not." Peggy picked her way over strewn trash without speaking for a minute or two. She took her hand off her gun when she reached the street; alleys were a favorite place for ambushes in the crime-ridden modern city, but they were relatively safe outside a bar heavily frequented by cops. 

"You seem to get along with Colleen," Daniel ventured, still trying to put into words the concept he was skirting around. "I mean, like a friend, not just like someone partnered with a CX."

"I do, though I also try to keep in mind that the way I feel about her is mostly my brain projecting human emotions because she looks so much like one. I try to treat her like a person as much as possible, and I noticed you doing the same with Chex. It only makes sense. If they aren't, you haven't lost anything; if they are, it would be inhuman to do anything else. And I think dehumanizing something that looks and acts so very human makes us more likely to dehumanize other human beings, as well."

"I wasn't _trying_ to do it with Chex," Daniel said, feeling guilty at receiving praise for intentions he hadn't even had. "It just sort of slipped out. I mean, I kept telling myself it didn't matter, but then I'd catch myself saying please and thank you anyway."

Peggy touched his arm. "And that's because you're a good man, Daniel. But with Colleen, even though I try to be as courteous to her as I would be to anyone I worked with, I know that she isn't a person. At least, I try not to fool myself into thinking that she is. For one thing, I'll only be disappointed if I expect consideration and friendship back from her, beyond what her programming tells her to do. She's simply not capable of reciprocating, even if she wanted to -- even if she had the capacity to want to, I should say. But Jack ..."

"He's different," Daniel said. "I'm starting to wonder exactly how different." 

 

***

 

Back at his apartment that evening, he looked up JK-1070's history. It had never seemed important enough to do it before, because, well ...

_Because they're interchangeable, right?_

And that _was_ true of the CX line. One was just the same as another; the only differences were cosmetic. But he was starting to think that wasn't at all true of the JK's.

First he checked on Jack's whereabouts. All the police Synthetics were equipped with a built-in tracker, and Jack was right where he should be, in the precinct headquarters, presumably plugged into his charging station in his nighttime downcycle. 

_If that actually IS what he does at night ..._ It was hard to imagine Jack socializing with the night-shift cops, at least any more cheerfully than he did with the day shift, but now Daniel thought about the rows of police Synthetics in their charging bays, and the way that Jack avoided their company during the day. Was it any easier being among them at night? Did he hate putting himself in temporary hibernation, a daily reminder of the machine that he was? Daniel briefly entertained the mental image of Jack spending the absolute minimum necessary amount of time recharging and then finding a quiet desk in a corner and going through casefiles by himself ... maybe that was why he was so damn efficient.

It was also just about the saddest thing he'd ever thought of.

 _One thing at a time, though._ He pulled up the history of unit JK-1070.

The JK line had been brought out roughly a decade ago, at the same time as the CX and JX lines which were now standard for police forces around the country. Jack had been operational for four years, and had spent most of that time partnered with a Detective Angie Martinelli.

Daniel found numerous complaints about the JK's, mostly to do with their erratic behavior, unreliability in the field, and poor decision-making, but he only came across a couple from Det. Martinelli involving Jack, and most of those were at the beginning of their working relationship. He did find complaints from other members of Martinelli's precinct about Jack, and it was about what he would have expected: insubordination, insulting fellow officers, and so forth. There was very little that was negative about his performance in the field, though. If Jack were human, the general impression from these files would have been "kind of an asshole, but good at his job."

Just about the same impression as actually working with him, then.

Few of the JK units had lasted very long in the field. The majority had been recalled after multiple complaints about their performance, especially freezing in the line of duty, refusing to follow reasonable orders (comforting thought, that), vanishing and turning up across the city during a duty shift, behaving "inappropriately" toward their partners, and "general erratic behavior," whatever that meant. There were also an alarming number of what Daniel, reading between the lines with his newfound suspicions about Jack, interpreted as suicide. More than one of them "fell" onto subway tracks in front of an oncoming train, and a number went out in various ways similar to Chex, getting blown up or otherwise destroyed in the pursuit of their duties. 

He _really_ did not want to think about Chex right now.

So, one by one, the JK's were destroyed, or destroyed themselves; they were found unsuitable for field work, recalled, and "retired." In the end, Jack had been one of the JK units that lasted the longest. What finally clinched it was Jack killing a civilian in the field. According to Martinelli's report, she'd been injured by a suspect and Jack had come upon the scene to find two homeless women trying to help her.

One of the items Daniel found in the file was Martinelli's testimony at a subsequent, closed hearing. She was sitting with her back straight in front of the camera, hair pulled back severely. She appeared to be still recovering from her injuries; one of her arms was in a sling, and her face was bruised. Daniel scrolled ahead, spot-checking until he reached her description of the incident.

"Jack saw me down on the ground, with Ms. Harper bending over me and her sister kneeling beside me. All he knew was that we'd both been in a firefight and I'd gone off the radio, and then he came around the corner, saw the situation, and made a snap decision. It wasn't a good decision. I fully support Ms. Harper's sister in her choice to sue the precinct. But the blame for the incident is mine, not Jack's. His programming told him to protect me, and the instructions I'd given him beforehand backed that up. He was only trying to follow orders. Take it up with the programmers, sue Stark if you want, but you can't destroy a tool for being used in the way it was made."

"Detective Martinelli," the impatient voice of her interlocutor spoke from off-camera. "I want you to look back on your previous testimony. You repeatedly refer to the Synthetic's decision-making in this situation. 'Jack saw me.' 'Jack decided.' 'Jack knew.' Also, it's worth pointing out that the official designation of the unit is JK-1070."

"I've been calling him -- it," she corrected herself. "I've called it Jack for four years. You'll excuse me if it's hard to get out of the habit. We all anthropomorphize them around here. Look, if Jack were an officer who did what he did, then he -- it should be disciplined, perhaps fired. But you're talking about _destroying_ it. And I think that's unjustifiable when the blame for the incident is really mine."

Daniel paused playback and leaned back in his chair. He studied Martinelli's face in the holographic display. She looked determined, sad, and deeply troubled.

He flipped through more search results. Martinelli had either been fired by the department, or quit; it seemed to depend on who you asked. Jack had been "decommissioned." Martinelli had tried to buy Jack from the department, which they had refused; she then tried to file a suit to stop Jack from being destroyed, but this was derailed by the dead woman's family suing Martinelli for wrongful death. These days, Martinelli was working for a nonprofit foundation dedicated to reducing police violence.

What it came down to, Daniel thought, reaching for a cold cup of coffee that he'd poured hours ago, was that Jack probably _would_ have been destroyed along with the other JK units if Martinelli's various lawsuits hadn't mired him in legal limbo until the department more or less forgot they still had him.

And it was obvious to Daniel that, as a cop, Jack had fucked up. He'd _royally_ fucked up. But Martinelli had tried to play it off as her own error, working to stop Jack from being hauled in and scrapped by attempting to convince her superiors that she was to blame, as the human in the situation, and that Jack was a mindless automaton who was only following orders. Daniel didn't think she believed it. Her record with Jack said otherwise. But she was trying to protect him.

And all those other JK units ... crazy, or dead, or destroyed ...

Jesus Christ, Daniel thought, burying his face in his hands. What have we done?

He thought about texting Peggy about it. Right now he desperately wanted to talk to someone -- to see if the ideas he was entertaining were even possible. But unleashing Peggy on a moral crusade was like pulling the pin on a grenade, and he wanted to talk to Jack first.

So he took all his doubts and uncertainties to bed with him, and lay awake for a long time, staring into the dark.

 

***

 

"You look like shit," was Jack's remark when Daniel picked him up at the station in the morning, running on about two hours of sleep.

"Yeah, sometimes I forget that I'm not twenty anymore and staying out late drinking isn't the good idea it used to be."

"Not something I'd know about."

"No, I guess not." Daniel pulled away from the curb.

"You're hiding something. How much trouble am I in?" Jack's face went android-blank. It was alarming no matter how many times Daniel saw him do it, all the animation and the subtle emotional responses that made him seem so human draining out of him, leaving him emotionally flat. Oddly, though, in this case, it made him easier to read, not less so. If Daniel was willing to embrace the madness -- the whole world said Synthetics couldn't feel anything, but Jack seemed to be able to -- and work off _that_ set of axioms, then Jack was scared, and retreating into android mode in order to avoid giving anything away.

Still, he had a feeling sympathy would only make things worse. "What, for last night? No trouble. Rowland's a dick and we all know it. Nobody's even sure how he made detective." After a pause, Daniel asked, "Am I really that easy to read?"

"There are a lot of tells in a human. Heart rate, breathing, tightening of the skin. Which brings us back to what you're hiding."

"It's not _hiding_ exactly," Daniel said. "It's more of a question I wasn't quite sure how to bring up, but since you asked, I was wondering if you've tried getting back in touch with your old partner since you got, uh, restarted."

The temperature in the car seemed to drop about ten degrees. "I see you've been looking me up," Jack said. He was still very blank, but a little of the ever-present anger was starting to seep out around the edges.

"You looked _me_ up," Daniel retorted. "So we're both sneaky, suspicious bastards."

"I'm a robot," Jack said harshly. "I'm not a sneaky suspicious anything; I'm an automaton that doesn't know how to do anything except follow orders. Or didn't you read what she said?"

"I read enough. And you didn't answer my question."

There was a long silence. Finally Jack said, "Why would I? You must've read enough to get the gist of it. She told the world what she really thought about me. Why would she want an android showing up at her door five years later?"

"Jack, you asshole, she was trying to save you."

Jack's hand shot out and gripped Daniel's arm in a grip so hard it hurt. Daniel jumped. If the car hadn't been on automatic right now, he'd probably have veered into the next lane and set off a ten-car pileup. 

"You think I don't know that?" Jack hissed viciously. "You think I don't understand humans well enough to get what she was trying to do? Yes, she was trying to save me from being scrapped. And in doing it, she betrayed how she really felt about me. You think if I was her _human_ partner, she'd have gotten up on that witness stand and told the world she thought I was mentally incompetent and not responsible for my actions? You think she'd have expected me to thank her if she'd done that?"

His fingers opened suddenly, as if he'd just realized he was holding Daniel hard enough to violate his programming ban on causing unnecessary damage to humans. Daniel stubbornly resisted the urge to rub his aching arm. Jack flexed his fingers a few times -- a very human gesture; Daniel couldn't help wondering if his programmers had included it or if he'd picked it up from people around him. Then he said, in a voice that was calmer but seemed to be poised on the edge of a much greater precipice, "If I'd been human, I would have done the crime and the time. But I'm not. So ... it doesn't matter. Or it's not supposed to. The woman I shot doesn't matter. The choice I made doesn't matter. Remember what I said earlier, about honesty? At least the police department understands that I was responsible enough for my own choices to send me off to be scrapped. My _partner_ didn't even give me that."

The car pulled smoothly out of the flow of traffic and drifted gently into a parking spot. They'd reached their destination, a block of stores known for dealing in black-market electronics. Still, Daniel didn't make a move for the door handle, and neither of them got out of the car. They sat for awhile in silence, staring through the windshield at passing pedestrians.

"She made a bad decision," Daniel said at last. "Okay, it was a dick move. I'm not sure if she realized how you'd feel or not. But I got the impression, watching those tapes, that she wouldn't have stopped even if she had known. She just wanted to save you, whatever the cost. Even if it hurt you."

"Hurt me," Jack echoed in a mocking tone. "Machines don't _hurt._ A car --"

" _Stop_ it," Daniel snapped, turning on him. "If you want to self-flagellate, fine, but one thing I can guarantee you I now know from watching those videos is that Detective Martinelli did _not_ view you as anything other than a person. She gave up her career and probably risked jail time for you. When was the last time you saw someone do that to save their car?"

There was a brief, tense silence, and again Daniel found himself wondering just how deep Jack's directive against hurting his partner went. If he had the capacity for as much free thought as he'd demonstrated, he could theoretically override that too, couldn't he?

"You're doing it too, you know," Jack said coldly.

"Doing what?" Daniel was genuinely confused.

"The same thing she did. You looked me up, and you found out I shot an unarmed civilian. If I weren't a robot, do you really think you'd be sitting here trying to coddle me about it?" And with that, he opened the door and left the vehicle, slamming it behind him.

Daniel sat there for a while longer, gazing through the windshield.

 

***

 

For the rest of the day, Jack was reserved and compliant, a well-behaved Synthetic, at least compared to how he normally was. Even no longer than Daniel had been working with him, this was enough to set off all kinds of warning bells; it almost made him want to poke at Jack somehow just to get some insults out of him, but he didn't want it to be taken in the wrong way.

He didn't know what to say to get them past this. And besides, Jack was _right._ If he'd found out something like that about Yauch or Rowland, even about Peggy, how would he have reacted?

_You can't consider someone morally responsible for their actions and let them off the hook when they do something morally repugnant. It doesn't work that way._

He still hadn't come to any conclusions that evening, when Jack went down to recharge, or to do whatever he did at night. Daniel shrugged off an invitation from Peggy to get a drink while she waited for Jason to get off work. He just wanted to go home. The thought occurred to him once he'd already taken off that talking over the capabilities of the JK line with Jason might actually help, but he didn't know Peggy's boyfriend that well -- he'd been friends with Peggy for a long time, but since she started dating Jason, he hadn't seen as much of her; they were still in the "flush of new love" stage. And now he felt like discussing it with Peggy would be some sort of betrayal of Jack ... and, just, aargh.

He cracked open a beer and picked at a preheated dinner while watching a movie on the holo. It was a dopey blockbuster about a Synthetic gone rogue, killing people and taking hostages, and the one heroic cop who had to stop it. 

There had been a lot of that kind of thing coming out lately, with Synthetics becoming more common in the real world. Mostly Synthetics in the media were villains or comic relief: either they were psychotic killing machines, or the bumbling robot version of a hayseed, failing to grasp human behavior and doing ridiculous things in an attempt to emulate humans. Sometimes, for variety, you got a Synthetic as the "special" sexbot love interest with a unique personality chip, or as the heroic sacrifice giving its life for the good of the humans around it ...

He shut off the holo and went to the window with his beer, leaving the half-eaten meal on the coffee table. The city sprawled in glittering blue and gold; the shopping districts were lit up with their multicolored holographic signs, throwing electric rainbows into the night. It was raining lightly, lending a soft-focus blurry glow to the colors. On the wall of the building across from his, an ad flashed through its thirty-second cycle.

"You have a visitor," his building's voice said.

Daniel looked up, surprised. He almost never had people over -- Peggy sometimes, when they were both single and would hang out and watch TV, but even that was rare. "Security cam."

The security feed came up from the camera in the building's secure lobby. It was Jack, hands shoved in his pockets, looking nervous.

Surprise left Daniel briefly speechless before he told the building, "Let him in."

The knock at his door came a few moments later. By that time he'd hastily gotten the trash cleaned up and was sitting at the kitchen island -- which passed for a table in his small apartment -- with his beer. Not that he could quite figure out why he had such a powerful urge to clean up his apartment and make it look good when his visitor was a Synthetic who probably didn't care.

On the other hand, if there ever was a Synthetic who'd judge him for messy housekeeping, that Synthetic was Jack ...

"Come in," he called, and the door opened in response.

"Sorry to bother you at home," Jack said, stepping inside. Raindrops glistened on his hair and the shoulders of his suit jacket. 

"No worries, I was just watching TV. Do you, uh --" Daniel had started to offer a beer, like he would to a human guest, but after last night's bar fiasco, he was afraid it would be taken badly. "Get you anything?" he tried.

"No," Jack said. "I wanted to ask you a question."

"Okay," Daniel said cautiously. Jack was still standing just inside the door. "Do you want to sit down while you ask it?"

Like a skittish stray cat, Jack came over to the kitchen island and eased onto the other stool. "You're a human."

"Yes," Daniel said. He had to fight down a smile, not sure how it would be received. "I think you can safely say that."

"So ... you know how humans think." Jack had been looking away, not quite meeting his eyes; now he raised his gaze to Daniel's face. "I'm supposed to be able to, but I'm starting to feel like there are gaps in my understanding. Can you ... explain? About Angie, and what she was thinking. I want to understand it."

It had never quite hit Daniel until that moment that, first of all, while he was starting to give in to the impossible-yet-apparently-true realization that Jack was capable of autonomy and emotion, he still wasn't human; his brain didn't quite work the same way. And second, Jack really didn't have much life experience at all. He was no child, but he had only been online for four years before his forced retirement ( _before they shut him down in preparation for destroying him, let's not beat around the bush here)_ and most of that time had been spent working. The best analogy Daniel could think of was an intelligent and well-read person raised in an incredibly isolated location and then suddenly turned loose in a big city, with a lot of theoretical knowledge about people gleaned from books and movies, but very little experience putting it into practice.

"I think she was terrified for you," Daniel said slowly, thinking back to Martinelli's tense, closed posture, her determined face and the occasional tremble in her voice as accusations were hurled at her. "I don't know what was going through her head, exactly. The only way to know for sure is to ask her, and even that might not help, because humans are notoriously unreliable about explaining our own states of mind. But she knew you'd be killed for what you did, and I'm pretty sure she was out to save you by whatever means it took. She used the defense that she thought was most likely to actually work, and blew up her own career in the process."

"Killed," Jack said slowly. He was still watching Daniel, his eyes intense. "You mean scrapped. Wiped."

"Well, yeah, but that's what it amounts to, isn't it? You'd be gone. Whatever words you use for it, that's death."

Jack shook his head, brushing off the argument. "She still didn't have any right to do what she did."

"I know, but she wasn't able to talk it over with you, was she? They must not have given you much time after that."

Jack's gaze dropped back to the kitchen island. "No. They used the override on me, and after that I was in and out for a while. They woke me up when they needed my testimony and then put me under again afterward. That's what I remember before waking up on the table and being assigned to you."

God. Daniel tried to imagine what it would have been like: unaware of the passage of time, being yanked back into the real world after unknown intervals so people who definitely did not have his best interests at heart could fire questions at him and then shut him off again. He hadn't seen any interviews with Jack in the files he'd pulled up, and he wondered if they had been deleted, or were classified at a higher level than Daniel was able to access. Why? Because they showed a Synthetic expressing emotion? Because they conflicted with Martinelli's version of events, which was now the official version? Had Stark Synthetics itself tried to bury them, not wanting the bad PR from having produced a malfunctioning robot? Or maybe it was nothing more than bureaucratic mishandling of evidence, and the files were safely stored somewhere else ...

But all of that was immaterial compared to the way Jack was staring at the countertop, closed in on himself and tightly controlled, with a million pieces of broken emotion underneath. At this moment, Daniel sensed that saying the wrong thing would snap whatever fragile trust had been tentatively growing between them. And he had no idea what the right thing might be.

What came out was, "No wonder you were pissed off at me. I don't blame you."

"It wasn't _you,"_ Jack said, a little impatiently. Then he looked up, and there it was, a tentative hint of his real smile, the one that touched his eyes. "Well, okay, it was you a little bit."

Daniel returned the smile, but it faded as he thought back on what he'd read last night -- tried to wrap his mind around the magnitude of what had happened, had been allowed to happen. "You should have been getting counseling. Instead they turned you off, turned you back on, and expected you to go back out in the field like nothing happened." And had made him a party to it, without telling him. "That's inhumane."

"What's inhumane is a woman getting shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time," Jack said harshly.

"I know." Daniel tried to back off and think about it as he would've if it had been Peggy, if it had been one of his other human coworkers. "The thing is, at this point, legally it's been dealt with. I know it's only -- God, it's only a few days ago for you, a couple of weeks at most, but for everybody else, it's been five years. The victim's family got a settlement from the department. Martinelli isn't a cop anymore; she's working with a group that's trying to stop that kind of thing from happening again -- did you find that out?"

Jack inclined his head in a slight nod. "I did." The faintest of smiles curved his lips. "That's the kind of thing she'd do." He sounded proud.

Daniel smiled back, and hoped he got to meet this Angie Martinelli one of these days. "So you beating yourself up about it isn't going to change anything. You getting sent back for recycling isn't going to change anything, either. The whole thing has been worked through, legally and financially. I mean, I'm not gonna tell you not to feel guilty --" Or whatever passed for it in a Synthetic, though he was starting to think it wasn't that different than it would be for a human. "If it happened to me, it's something I'd probably carry with me forever. And I should. You should. But ... not in a way that paralyzes you or makes it impossible for you to ever do anything good again." It bothered him the way Jack was listening to him; he'd become the wholehearted focus of Jack's attention, making Daniel acutely aware how unsuited he was for dealing with this kind of crisis. "But look, you really ought to have counseling about this. I'm just pulling guesses out of the dark. They should've offered it."

Jack snorted a bitter laugh. "Yeah, and if a Synthetic isn't working right and needs a personality adjustment, what kind of fix are they going to do, Sousa? Tell me that."

He didn't want to say it, but ... "Yeah. They'd wipe you. Got it."

"But you're right ... that it's in the past, I mean. I can't change it." Jack looked down at his hands, open on the countertop. "They keep saying I'm dangerous. Unreliable. Shouldn't be out on the street. And they're _right_ \--"

"Only for most of the same reasons as any human cop, as far as I can tell, but we haven't banned humans yet," Daniel said. "And it's not like any of the other Synthetic models never made a mistake with a threat assessment. The department doesn't like to admit that it happens, but it does. There's no reason why you should be singled out for disposal when we've still got hundreds of CX models on the street, in spite of all the times individual units have fucked up at adequately determining a threat. I mean, that's why the department keeps trying to get more sophisticated models into the field -- because they can make better decisions."

Jack didn't answer.

"So what do _you_ want to do?" Daniel asked after a moment of silence between them.

Jack looked startled. Obviously this was not a question he was asked much. The silence dragged on and Daniel waited, until Jack said at last, "I think ... I'd like to see Angie. Talk to her. Do you think that's a bad idea?"

"I think it's a very good idea." A fleeting thought crossed Daniel's mind: _Were they involved, Jack and Martinelli?_ Before a few days ago, he wouldn't even have wondered about it. If Martinelli was using her admittedly hot Synthetic for sexual release, it wasn't illegal or any of his business, and as far as having a relationship, there wasn't really anything you could do with a Synthetic along those lines other than have sex ... he'd thought.

But now, after all he'd seen, he didn't think it was impossible for Martinelli to have fallen in love with Jack during four years of working with him. He could see how it could have happened. And Jack, well ... _can Synthetics love?_ Another question he'd never have thought to ask before a few days ago. If he had, the answer would obviously have been "no". But now ...

... now, he realized, the question was both stupid and irrelevant. Whatever you wanted to call it, whether "love" was the right word, whether they'd been _in love_ or not, Angie Martinelli had cared for Jack enough to sacrifice her career on the remote chance she could save him, and Jack cared for her enough that he was tied up in knots at the idea that she'd abandoned and betrayed him. _Who cares if it's nothing more than electrical impulses and ones and zeroes? What is human love, anyway, except electricity in the brain and a stew of chemicals in the bloodstream? It's still love._

"I'll drive you over there in the morning," Daniel said. "Will that work?"

He got another of those almost-shy almost-smiles. "Yeah. That'd work." Jack straightened and pushed himself off the stool. "Well, guess I've taken up enough of your time."

"Wait." Daniel swung around on the stool. "Uh ... don't go? I mean, unless you need to recharge urgently. You don't have to rush off. I was just going to watch a movie or something. You want to ... hang out?"

"So help me, Sousa," Jack said, sounding in that instant very human, "if this is some kind of pity-the-poor-android party --"

"No, it's just that I'm not planning to do anything tonight other than watch TV and drink beer, and I think I'd rather do it with company. If that's something you might want to do."

Jack hesitated, and then gave a small nod.

With hundreds of thousands of streaming movies and TV shows to choose from, Daniel figured he had to be able to find _something_ that didn't portray Synthetics as ridiculous, evil, or both. He ended up randomly picking a movie with aliens and explosions. 

Jack watched at first with a blank, expressionless stare -- which Daniel interpreted optimistically as "I don't know the right thing in this social situation, so I'm not going to do anything at all." The pessimistic option was that he hated the whole experience and was only doing it because he thought Daniel wanted him to. On the other hand, their entire working relationship had involved Jack fighting tooth and nail against anything he didn't want to do, so it was hard to believe he'd endure an experience he loathed just for the sake of being polite.

_No, it's more that he's not used to watching movies with people, and doesn't know how you're supposed to behave._

_I think._

"This thing is pretty dull, huh?" Daniel remarked after the fiftieth or sixtieth gratuitous explosion. "And predictable. Want to make a bet about where it's going?"

Jack shrugged. "I'd win. I looked up the plot at the beginning."

Daniel had forgotten Jack was always online; he was a walking internet link. "Why?"

"I wanted to know what we were going to watch."

"Yeah, but the point of watching a movie is being surprised."

Jack gave the holographic display a sardonic glance. "And yet you picked this."

"Can't really argue," Daniel muttered. He scrolled through streaming options and stopped on a baseball game in Tokyo. "Okay, this one is going on right now, so you can't look up the outcome."

"Being surprised again."

"Exactly," Daniel said. "Uh, which may not have the same effect on you. I would try to explain why humans find it pleasurable to be surprised, but honestly I have no earthly clue."

"No, you don't have to explain," Jack said, unexpectedly. "I understand. I don't know if it's the same for me, but I also find surprises rewarding. Maybe they programmed that into me."

"Maybe it just goes along with --" _Being alive,_ he was going to say, but he wasn't sure how Jack would take that. "Experiencing life," he finished weakly.

Jack smirked at him, like he knew exactly what Daniel was going to say, but didn't prod at it.

So they watched Japanese baseball, and Daniel had two more beers. He was stretched out on the couch, and somewhere in the middle of the eighth inning, he fell asleep.

He wasn't sure what woke him, but when he raised his head, the sound was turned low on the holo and the lights were dim. Jack was at the door. "You leaving?" Daniel asked, his voice scratchy from sleep.

Jack turned back. "I didn't mean to wake you. Gotta go back to the station, recharge and whatnot. It's late."

"Yeah, I guess you do." Daniel rubbed at his crusted eyes and considered the wisdom of falling back asleep on the couch. "Pick you up first thing in the morning," he added, yawning. 

Hesitation, then a small nod, and the door closed.

 

***

 

In the morning, Daniel called in and told them he was taking a personal day. He almost never took time off, and he figured they owed him this. Well, in all honesty they owed _Jack_ this, but a Synthetic definitely wasn't going to get a day off, so Daniel would just have to take one for both of them.

Jack was immobile and expressionless on the drive through the city, but this wasn't his usual, resentful "I am a Synthetic so leave me alone" kind of studied blankness. Instead it seemed to be run-of-the-mill nervousness. About halfway through the drive he spoke suddenly. "You know I could take public transportation for this."

"I know," Daniel said. "Do you want to? I can let you out."

Silence, then: "No."

Angie Martinelli's workplace was in a sprawling complex of office towers. Daniel's car parked itself in the attached parking garage. "I can wait down here," he told Jack as the car settled. "It's up to you. I don't mind."

"No point in taking a day off just to sit in a parked car," Jack said with some of his usual sardonic spark. "C'mon up and pick up some brochures or something."

He set off briskly, but by the time they got to Martinelli's floor, he was lagging behind, and Daniel had to open the door and lead the way into a small, pleasant office, tastefully decorated. The secretary was a human, who smiled at them -- with perhaps a little more welcome for Jack. This was something Daniel had already resigned himself to; when the two of them were together, Jack got a little more attention, at least until people noticed the blue cuffs. "Can I help you?"

"Yeah, we're here to see --" Daniel began, but just then Jack went completely still beside him, and Daniel looked up to see that a woman had stepped out of one of the back offices, engrossed in a tablet.

She was tiny. He hadn't realized, watching the recordings, that Martinelli was so short. Her hair in the interviews had been pulled back in a severe bun, but now it was a riot of strawberry-blond curls, and she wore a cardigan and skirt. She looked like a completely different person. _A much happier person,_ he thought.

"Cora," she said over her shoulder, "could you please see that the --" And then she looked up and saw Jack.

There was a still instant in which no one moved -- the receptionist merely looked confused -- before Angie laid the tablet aside and took a few slow steps forward, which turned into running steps. She threw her arms around him. "Jack," she said. "Jack!"

And then she jerked back as if she'd been burned, and took a few quick steps away. "Er, _are_ you Jack?" she asked anxiously. "I mean, do you know me?"

"I do. I am." Jack's voice didn't get hoarse in the human way, but Daniel could still hear the emotion behind it.

"They didn't wipe you," Angie breathed. "You're -- _you."_

"I'm me." He was grinning at her, really _grinning_ , and it took Daniel's breath away. "And you're you."

"Well, I'm a slightly different me than the one you knew, but ... yeah." She turned to Daniel. "This must be your new partner, am I right?"

Daniel tried to recover from the shock of seeing Jack happy. It made him look like a whole different person -- and yes, _person_ was the only word that applied. Daniel got himself back together and stuck out a hand. "Detective Daniel Sousa, ma'am."

Angie shook it vigorously. "I'm happy to meet you, Detective Sousa."

"You should call him Daniel," Jack said. "He's one of the good ones."

Daniel's head whipped around and he stared at Jack, who refused to meet his eyes, attention fixed on Angie instead.

Angie was grinning hugely. She took Jack's hand. "It's so amazing to see you. I wish I could get away for lunch today, but I simply can't. Come into the back though, and I can take a quick coffee break, all right?"

She turned to Daniel, but he was already preparing a polite demurral. He really did want to talk to Angie, to get to know her, but he was people-savvy enough to know that they needed to have their first conversation in five years alone. "I've got an errand to run. Pick you up when you're done?"

"See what I mean," Jack murmured to Angie, almost imperceptibly quiet.

He was like a different person with her. The guardedness was still there, but he was warmer, more open, more _human._ It was fascinating to watch.

"Thank you," Angie said simply, smiling at Daniel, and she ushered Jack into the back.

Having nowhere specific to go, Daniel took a walk around the building, finding his way eventually into a garden atrium where he sat for awhile, watching rain streak the windows.

His leg tended to ache on rainy days. He told himself it was his imagination, but maybe it wasn't; maybe there was something about colder, damper weather that got into the stump of his thigh, making him more conscious than he normally was of the slight tickle of the electrical contacts for the prosthesis, the lag in the way it responded.

The new synthetic limbs were supposed to be indistinguishable from the real thing, but they weren't, of course. Nothing artificial was.

Or so he'd thought. 

He laid a hand on the knee of the artificial leg. It felt like a real leg through the fabric of his pants. The skin dimpled when he pressed on it, and it was warm to the touch. He ran his hand up his thigh, finding the slight ripple of the seal where the sophisticated electronic cradle held what remained of his real leg in its grip.

It was the same tech as Synthetics' bodies. Indistinguishable from real human skin, they said. _Run, walk, swim!_ And he could do all of those things. Hell, he could run faster, jump higher; he'd discovered that he could manage an eight- or ten-foot standing jump if he kicked off only with the prosthesis, using its inhumanly strong knee to catapult him. The stump was still sensitive, though; he definitely paid the price later.

And maybe the place where he'd gone wrong all along -- where they'd _all_ gone wrong -- was in thinking of it as a replacement for the flesh and blood he'd lost. Trying to make an artificial leg identical in all ways to a flesh-and-bone leg was an endeavor that could never quite achieve perfection. It would always fall short in some way.

But if you tried to perfect it to be the best at what it is, instead of what it isn't ... 

He'd never get back the body he'd lost. He would always have a few extra hassles to deal with, such as recurring pain in the stump and the nightly routine of taking the leg off, recharging it, and making sure the stump got aired out and washed along with the rest of him.

But his new leg was a perfectly serviceable leg, even if it wasn't a human leg, and it could do things the other one hadn't been able to.

He smiled a little, rubbing idly at the contact between flesh and plastic, gazing out the window at the rain misting the city. This particular line of reasoning wasn't one he planned to share with Jack, who probably wouldn't appreciate the comparison. But he wondered if part of the reason why AIs made humans so nervous -- nervous enough to destroy them if they appeared to come too close to genuine intelligence -- was that same Uncanny Valley sensation of "almost, but not quite close enough." They _didn't_ think exactly like humans; they didn't feel the same things, experience the world the same. They probably couldn't, not when they could think at computer speed and access the internet to instantly answer any question. And, perhaps more importantly, their bodies weren't the same; as Jack had pointed out during that one disastrous evening at the bar, robots didn't have chemicals and hormones coursing through their bodies to produce physical and emotional reactions.

But they still felt. Daniel couldn't stop thinking about Jack's dazzling smile at Angie. It had been a brief glimpse of who he could be -- who he _was,_ really, underneath all of the anger and fear, all of the defense mechanisms he'd learned to deal with the human world.

_Emotions don't have to be exactly like human emotions to still BE emotions. They're still real. They still count._

And if he didn't get back to Angie's nonprofit soon, he was going to force them to wander around the whole building looking for him. He pushed himself up and waited out a muscle spasm in his thigh -- psychosomatic or not, he didn't know; the docs said the electrodes shouldn't make the muscle cramp, but sometimes it did anyway. All in his head or all in his body, it didn't really matter. The result was the important thing.

With these thoughts running circles in his head, he walked back to the nonprofit, where he found Jack and Angie saying a lingering goodbye in the outer office. She was gripping his forearms, looking up at him as they spoke quietly, and Daniel felt like an intruder. He started to turn away, but they'd already seen him. Jack pulled back, retreating emotionally as well. 

"So we'll have lunch sometime soon," Angie said to him.

"Yeah. That'd be nice." He turned away, and glanced at Daniel. "Meet you at the car," he said, and strode out fast.

Daniel decided it was best to give him a little privacy. "You guys have a good talk?" he asked Angie.

"We did." She smiled briefly. "Well, it was me talking, mostly. He hasn't had a lot of life experience in the last five years to talk about." A shadow of anger passed through her eyes, there and gone. "But I'm glad he had you to wake up to. He speaks well of you, you know."

"I didn't even know he liked me." But actually, as he said it, he realized it wasn't quite true.

"He has a lot of reasons to distrust people."

"Yeah. I figured that out." 

"I'm going to assume you've seen the news stories," Angie said. "You know what happened before I left the force."

"I know. And I know it's why you're here now." He glanced around, his eye lingering on the flyers and brochures for training seminars, protests, class action lawsuits. "The work you're doing here ... could I help somehow? I'd like to do something, if I could -- I don't know, do outreach or something."

Angie beamed at him. "We could really use more people who are still active members of the police force to help us, especially with setting up training programs and recruiting others to take our nonviolence pledges. We have ex-cops in our corner, but not very many on active duty. Do you think you might be interested in something like that?"

"I'd like to give it a try. I think some of the people I work with might, too." It sounded right in Peggy's wheelhouse.

She gave him a stack of flyers, and, to his surprise, hugged him at the door. "Take care of him," she murmured into his ear. "Jack doesn't have very many people in his corner. He could really use another one."

"I will," Daniel said, and meant it.

He had every intention of giving Jack time to get his emotions under control, or whatever it was that he was doing, _without_ using the tracker to locate him. He was prepared to sit in the car for awhile. But he got back to the car to find Jack already there, leaning a hip against the door.

"So," Jack said as they got in. "Back to the station?"

"Come on, we've still got most of a day off."

" _You've_ got a day off. I'm hardware. On your days off, I'd normally pair up with another detective or put in an extra recharge-and-defrag cycle or two."

He'd never really thought about it with Chex or any of the other CX and JX models. On the days when he didn't come in to work, they were just ... not there. In all fairness he didn't generally think about his human coworkers while he was off duty either. But still.

"Did you ever do anything social with Angie? Off duty, I mean."

Jack shrugged. "There were a few times. We'd get a drink or she'd take me to the company picnic or something like that. She's married, though, and her wife wasn't so hot on the idea of a robot crashing their couple time."

"She's married? I had kind of wondered if you two were ..."

Jack gave a sudden laugh. "What, me and Angie? Get real. First off, there's the married thing, and second, she's not into guys that way. Plus, fucking an android is one thing, but who in their right mind would date one?"

"I would," Daniel said without thinking.

He wasn't expecting Jack to stiffen as if Daniel had hit him. "You're one of _those?_ " Jack's face had gone expressionless again. "Well, at least now I know why you're going out of your way to do all of this for me."

"What? No!" Daniel was blushing now, he was sure of it. "I'm not some kind of ... of creepy robot fetishist. I know those people exist, the ones that swear their sexbot is in love with them and jerk off to catalogues and -- Look, the point is, I've been with a sexbot exactly once and I hated it."

"Good to know how you really feel --"

"Would you just _shut up_ for a minute and stop putting the worst possible spin on everything I say? You want to know why I hated fucking a sexbot, Jack? Because _it_ couldn't enjoy it, and I don't get off on that. I felt like I was raping it. Intellectually, I know that's not accurate, but what it comes down to is that I need my sex partner to do more than to ... to _pretend_ to enjoy it."

"You know that's stupid, right?" Jack said. He'd lost some of the emotional flatness, though. "Your car has more brain than your average sexbot. They're basically a recording that plays back oohs and ahhs at the right moment. It can't pretend any more than it can enjoy anything. You might as well complain about oppressing your dildo."

"I know that! Intellectually, I know that. But try telling that to my gonads." 

Jack was smirking now.

"Okay, no. Stop that. Forget I said anything." Daniel could feel himself blushing hotter. Another thing androids didn't have to worry about ... at least he thought not. Perhaps there was a blush response and he simply hadn't managed to trigger it yet. "The _point_ is, I took the whole day off, and I really don't feel like going back to work. Is there anything you want to do?"

Jack shrugged.

"Oh, come on. Do you have any hobbies, interests, things you like to do?"

"I'm a _robot,_ Sousa."

"If you answer every question I ask you with 'I'm a robot,' it's going to take us forever to get anywhere, so let's just skip that and go straight to the actual answers, why don't we?"

Jack sighed, or at least made a noise like a sigh; he didn't breathe most of the time, but apparently he could do it to express exasperation. "Machines," he said. "I'm interested in machines."

It was difficult to tell how sarcastic he was being, but Daniel decided to take it at face value. "Cool. We're not too far from the Museum of Technology. You ever been there?"

"No," Jack said, looking startled.

"We went a few times when I was a kid. Field trips and whatnot. It's pretty cool. You want to play hooky and go?"

After a moment, Jack said, "Sure."

 

***

 

They spent the afternoon wandering around the museum. Daniel had a brief spell of _This is a terrible idea, what was I thinking_ when they pulled into the parking garage (he was picturing a repeat of the bar fiasco, only possibly worse) but it turned out to be fun. The museum was a huge, rambling complex covering at least a city block. One enormous wing was devoted to two hundred years' worth of cars, airplanes, and computers, and Jack turned out to be fascinated by the older models. He crouched to peer at the underside of a Ford Model A, peeked inside an old lunar lander module with evident fascination, tapped the keys lightly on a 'Touch 'n' Feel!' exhibit of 20th-century computers. "Meet Grandma," he told Daniel with a cocky grin as he poked at a 1980s-era IBM PC.

"That's not funny."

"Yes it is. I'll call her Gam-Gam and take her home with me. She can live in the corner of my recharging cubicle."

Daniel almost said something about being able to pick one up from any landfill, but clapped his mouth shut. Contrary to what Peggy sometimes teasingly claimed, he _did_ learn from experience, and he was still figuring out the boundaries of what he could joke about with Jack.

_Well, I only figured out he actually had a sense of humor a day or two ago. Cut me some slack._

From there, they wandered into a wing with exhibits demonstrating basic technological and physical principles, most of them aimed at schoolchildren. There were a number of children here, various tour groups investigating hands-on displays of levers, fluid dynamics, electrical circuits, structural engineering, and more.

And Daniel discovered something new about Jack: he liked kids. Or at least they liked him. Jack seemed a little disconcerted, at first, by all the small humans swirling around his knees, but before too long he was kneeling to show a little girl in a wheelchair how the applied force exhibit related to moving her chair, or holding up a little boy so he could watch the sand whirl in a tornado simulator.

They wandered, eventually, from the hands-on exhibits into a wing with medical and biological technology. "Look, Sousa," Jack said, pointing to a display of wooden prosthetic legs from the early 20th century. "I found your leg's grandma."

"Fuck you, Jack." Daniel flipped him off. A second later he wondered if that was going too far, but Jack simply looked smug and happy with himself, so apparently not.

And he was smiling a _lot._ Daniel had never seen him smile this much. It was partly the visit with Angie, he knew, but he wondered how much of it was just getting away from the precinct and being around people who didn't recognize Jack for what he was, as long as he kept the sleeves pulled down over his wrists.

Then they turned the corner into the next exhibit and Daniel thought, _Shit._

This was the display of androids. Rows of different models stood on either side of the main hallway. On this end, the display started out with early efforts at interactive machines -- Roombas, Furbys, Neopets, primitive walking robots from the first decade of the 21st century -- but farther along the hall, Daniel could see perfectly human-looking androids standing at attention for viewers to marvel at. There were DRNs and MKs, CXs and JXs. He had no doubt there was probably a JK up there somewhere, with Jack's blond hair and Jack's narrow face, and those striking hazel eyes staring straight ahead with no expression in them, like those of a corpse.

Jack had gone tense, his posture straightening and his emotions flattening out.

"Attention visitors," a voice came over the PA, in what Daniel could only think of as a classic 'saved by the bell' moment. "The museum will be closing in half an hour. Please finish your tours and return to the lobby."

"Hey." He nudged Jack with his shoulder, without really thinking about it. "We've spent the whole day here, and I'm about done. Let's get a drink. Museum's about to close anyway."

"Alcohol still doesn't affect me, you know," Jack said, but he looked a little less flattened-out.

"It doesn't have to be a bar. That's just an idea." And even while he said it, he was thinking: Jack wasn't his type. Jack was the exact opposite of his type. He didn't go for blonds, he didn't go for that particular kind of pretty face, and he _definitely_ didn't go for robots. Especially asshole robots.

But, Christ, the things he was thinking right now.

Apparently, blond asshole robots who liked kids were exactly his type. Who knew.

 

***

 

They ended up in a bar, because there was a halfway-decent looking one across from the museum, and no restaurants in sight.

Daniel went to a corner table by habit -- it was just around getting-off-work time, so there weren't too many people in yet -- and ordered a beer from the touchscreen table menu. "You don't have to get anything. I don't care."

"No, it's interesting. I might not get the same high off alcohol that you do, but I like adding new flavors to my chemical analysis files." He ordered a pumpkin liquor that looked appalling to Daniel, but maybe it was less offputting to someone who didn't have a gag reflex.

"Interesting when you aren't with a group of assholes treating you like a performing monkey, anyway," Daniel said. "Present company not excluded."

"It's all right. I know you were trying to include me, that's all." Jack smiled suddenly. "I liked the woman."

"Peggy? She's great. One of the few people in the place with a lick of sense."

"Your boss is sharp. Dooley."

"Yeah, he is," Daniel conceded. "Honestly, they aren't a bad bunch. Just ..."

"Human?"

Their drinks came, delivered by a robot that made no pretense at a human exterior: a cart controlled by small wheels underneath. Daniel swiped his card in the slot it extruded. As it trundled away, he looked over at Jack, sniffing and then sampling his pumpkin liquor, struck by a brand new unpleasant thought. "You don't get paid, do you?"

"Nope. I'm not a person. Can't own things. Obviously can't have a bank account or credit card." Jack sipped from his glass. "Huh, you might like to know that this one's only mildly toxic to humans. I love how you poison yourselves for fun."

Daniel refused to let him change the subject. "I never really thought that you can't even buy yourself things if you want them."

"What would I want, though?" Jack said, raising his glass in a mock toast. "I'm a robot. My partner gets a government allowance to keep me from being a naked robot. I get free electricity at the station, and that's all I need."

"Yeah, except tickets to museums, or new flavors of alcohol to try -- how is that one, by the way?"

"Interesting aromatics," Jack said. "The coloring agent has a particularly complex flavor. Not precisely what you wanted to know, I realize." He held out the glass. "Try it."

Daniel took it. Sipped. Made a face.

"What does it taste like to you?" Jack asked, taking the glass back. His fingertips brushed Daniel's briefly and, Daniel thought, unintentionally; they were, as always, a little warmer than human.

"Like pumpkin pie that's gone off, soaked in vodka."

Jack took another sip. "I do taste the vodka. And spoilage. But most alcohol has slight overtones of decay. That's literally what it is, you know. A natural decay process."

"Thanks for ruining beer for me," Daniel muttered, reaching for the bottle.

"It's part of the service I provide as a JK unit." He sipped again, carefully. "Spoiled pumpkin, spices, and vodka. Yes, I do taste those things. Can you taste the color? The chemical they used to make it orange, I mean."

"That's food coloring? Awesome." Daniel accepted the glass again, and took another cautious sip. "Uh, it does taste sort of ... chemical? And awful. You can have the rest."

"The human sense of taste is so imprecise. I could try another brand and tell you exactly which parts of the formula were different."

"Humans can do that too, though," Daniel said. "I mean, try asking somebody about Coke and Pepsi sometime. Or different formulas of the same soft drink. We know it doesn't taste right, we just can't tell you why."

"Interesting. You've got more layers of precision than you can process, but you can still access them on some level." Jack held the glass up to the light, holding it lightly between his fingertips, addressing it and not Daniel. "What I don't have, though, is that direct emotional connection you do. You take a drink and it not only releases dopamine due to the ethanol, but you also get feelings, like 'awful' or 'wonderful' or 'I used to drink this at Mother's house.' Angie would talk about it. But for me, it's just chemical analysis."

"Whereas I get a chemical kick off it, like you were talking about at the bar a few nights ago? Big deal. I bet you get an electrical one. Actually ..." He reached across the table and took Jack's drink.

"Hey!"

"C'mon," Daniel said, covering the mouth of the glass with his hand. "Tell me you aren't going to drink pumpkin liquor from here on out and think about tonight. Tell me you won't have emotions from that. Tell me that's different from what humans do. Go on, tell me."

"Fuck you, I don't know," Jack said, though his tone was mildly irritated rather than combative. "I don't know what you feel. All I know is that humans talk about how amazing it is, the sensation of linking memories to smells and tastes and music, and I definitely don't get _that."_

"So what?" Daniel tried another sip of the goddawful stuff. Fuck _him,_ he'd probably ruined himself. He was going to associate pumpkin liquor with this night in the bar from now until the end of time. Whether it would be a good or bad memory remained to be seen ... "We don't know how other humans experience things, either. Some of us don't feel things the way other people do. Our brains are wired differently from each other."

"Not as differently as mine is."

"I know." Daniel handed it back. "So maybe you can't get the same kind of visceral response. But there's still something, right? If your brain works anything like ours does, you must handle memory something like the same way, and your emotions must be wound up in it too. Hell, I don't even know how _my_ brain works, let alone yours. But take a drink of that and tell me it's nothing but pumpkin-flavored chemicals now."

"This conversation is getting ridiculous," Jack said, but he smiled a little, and took another small sip.

The level in the glass had barely gone down ... of course, he was drinking for the taste, not for the effects. "You want to try a different one?" Daniel asked, reaching for the menu touchscreen. "It looks like they have beer samplers; you could try a bunch of little ones."

A hint of a smile flirted around Jack's mouth. "You know you can't get me drunk, Sousa. It's not possible."

"I know, but I need to order something to eat before I drink any more, or you'll get to deal with an inebriated human tonight. So I may as well get you something else at the same time."

He ordered another beer and a burger for himself, and a microbrew sampler for Jack. When the burger and fries arrived, Jack looked interested enough that Daniel offered him a french fry for sampling.

"The grease is too old," Jack reported after a small taste. "These aren't good for you."

"You're just determined to ruin all the pleasures in my life." Daniel liberally spread the fries with ketchup and munched a few of them simply to prove a point. Also, he was starving.

While Daniel took large bites of the burger, Jack touched his fingertip to the ketchup and tasted it. Daniel meant to grouse about touching his food, but his mouth was full, and by the time he'd swallowed, he was curious again. "You really like sampling things, don't you? Collecting new flavors."

"It's interesting," Jack said. "I can look up the answer to nearly any question in a fraction of a second. But _this_ I can't look up -- the age of the grease in their fryer, the exact chemical makeup of the potatoes that made the fries, the different formulas of ketchup manufacturers."

It wasn't why humans liked the taste of food. But, Daniel reminded himself, Jack didn't need the nutrients; there was no reason why food would taste good to him for the same reasons it did to a human. But he _did_ actually enjoy the taste, or at least found it interesting, because it was a new experience.

"I like to read," Daniel offered, realizing that he hadn't volunteered much information about himself so far. Jack glanced up with a dryly amused expression, and Daniel hoped it didn't seem like a total non sequitur. Hobbies, was what he was thinking. Interests. _You tell me something about you, I tell you something about me_ ... up to now, he hadn't been pulling his weight in this give and take, it seemed. "Or at least, I used to. I read a lot when I was a teenager. Kinda got out of the habit with work and all."

"I didn't even understand fiction at first." Jack's voice was soft. "What you said yesterday, about being surprised, makes a lot of sense. But mostly it's about parsing human behavior, isn't it? To understand fiction, you have to understand people. I remember the first time I read a book. I didn't understand it at all."

"Why did you want to read it?" Daniel asked. Somehow it seemed like an important question: a key one, maybe, to understanding him.

"Angie suggested it. She thought it would help me understand people better. Like you pointed out, that's the whole point of making an AI as sophisticated as me, so we can make better decisions in the field." Jack looked down at one of the small beer glasses, before lifting it to sip at it. "But with me," he went on after a moment, "it seemed like the more I saw, the more data my learning algorithms absorbed, the harder it was to make decisions at all. Too much data, too hard to sift through. Chaos instead of order. So I read books and tried to understand why humans do the things they do."

God. It was like giving a child a gun and sending them out into the field. Except ... no, because Jack _wasn't_ a child, not at all -- he wasn't lacking in adult perspective, adult judgment. He just didn't know how to apply it.

How much life experience had they given him a chance to absorb before they put a gun in his hand and sent him out with Angie, expecting him to make life or death decisions? Based on what he'd seen so far, Daniel had a dark feeling they'd probably done it the very first day.

But then he wondered how much of a person Jack really had been in the beginning. The JK models learned and changed, became individuals. Maybe the capability for independent thought was something that had developed naturally, as Jack continued to work with Angie, as his AI brain grew new connections, added new data, and eventually crossed whatever threshold separated the sentient from the non-sentient.

 _Is that the reason why he's like he is now instead of like the other JK units? He's not suicidal, not insane, because they partnered him with someone decent, a good cop who treated him well, talked to him like a person, and didn't force him to do anything that went against his programming._

It made a certain horrible kind of sense. Daniel had been appalled by the treatment of the JK units before, but now he had to set down his beer as his stomach rebelled. Thinking of the young AIs essentially coming into their personhood in what amounted to a neglectful environment at best, and powerfully abusive at worst ... 

_No wonder they killed themselves; no wonder they went psychotic. It's a testament to how ... decent, I guess they are, for lack of a better word, that very few of them ever became dangerous. They hurt themselves, not other people._

"You got quiet all of a sudden." Jack reached out a hand and cautiously touched Daniel's wrist; blue light glimmered softly under his artificial skin, and Daniel realized he was reading things like skin tension and temperature in his partner. "You're ... angry? I don't _think_ it was something I said."

"It wasn't. Not really." Daniel began, from habit, to walk himself back down from what he was feeling, and then he thought, no, if there ever was a time to be angry, this is it.

Jack pulled his hand back. Ever since they'd talked to Angie, he had been more relaxed, more human-seeming, than Daniel had ever seen him. Now he was starting to shut down again, in that way Daniel had come to recognize of retreating into his machine mode as a defense against uncertainty and fear.

He wasn't sure how Jack would take honesty about this particular issue, given how sensitive he could be. But, as the animation in Jack's face sank back into his machine-like mask, Daniel wondered if anything but honesty could redeem the situation.

"You're right," he said. "I'm angry. Angry and sick -- no, furious, actually. What they did ..." He stopped, unable to find the words.

"Who?" Jack asked. His voice was flatter, but not quite mechanical. There was curiosity in it. "What who did?"

Because of course he hadn't followed the same logical leaps that Daniel's brain had been chasing. "The other JK units ... do you know what happened to them?"

He was afraid, then, that he'd made the wrong choice, because Jack's expression flattened out completely. "We're a flawed line. Defective, unstable. Most of the others broke down and had to be taken out of service."

"No they fucking _weren't."_ Daniel's voice was still low, but he realized his hands were shaking. "No you _aren't._ What happened to the JK line, and, God, for all I know, any number of others, was ... it was a travesty, Jack. It was a crime. You're as capable of thinking and feeling as any human being I've ever met. Maybe you weren't meant to, maybe nobody even realized it --" Although that was the easy way out, because he'd realized it within a week of working with Jack; surely others must have, too. "But you didn't break down like machines do. You broke down like _people_ do. And they killed you for it."

He stopped, pressing the back of his fist to his mouth, trying to get himself under control.

"You're ... angry _for_ me," Jack said slowly.

Daniel looked up at the wall, reluctant to meet his eyes. "For you, for all of them. Yeah, I guess I am. The fuckers made you, and then they killed you, and if I were you, I'd be angry enough to burn the world down."

He finally managed to bring himself to look into Jack's face, and found Jack staring at him with an expression that was soft, startled, open. If Daniel had still had any doubts that Jack was capable of emotion, the look in those warm, wondering eyes would have done away with it. He had to struggle not to look away for a different reason this time; it was too much.

"You're a piece of work, Sousa," Jack said softly.

"Uh, thanks, I th --"

He didn't get any further because Jack leaned across the space between them and kissed him.

It was nothing at all like kissing a sexbot. Daniel remembered what that had been like, the way the android's responses had been technically correctly and yet somehow wrong: the element of human spontaneity wasn't there, the way that a real partner's reactions were unpredictable and never quite the same twice, a direct window into their state of mind. Jack's lips were soft, responsive, and reactive. He was a little hesitant at first, a little clumsy, and then suddenly bold, kissing back with passion.

And yet it wasn't quite like kissing a human. Jack didn't taste quite the same. There was the flavor of the alcohol he'd been drinking, and underneath it ... nothing at all, except a very slight flavor that was chemical or plasticky, but not unpleasant.

The whole experience was different and unique and like nothing Daniel had ever done before.

Jack was the one who broke off the kiss, pulling back. His face was soft and fascinated, eyes never leaving Daniel's as he brushed the tip of his tongue across his lips.

And Daniel couldn't help laughing, a bright bubble of joy welling up in him. He felt so _light_ ; he didn't remember the last time he'd felt like this. "You bastard, you were sampling me!"

Startlement, amusement, and nervousness chased each other across Jack's face: open, for a change, his emotions plain to see. 

"That better not be the only reason."

Jack's reaction was half a smile, but as Daniel started to come down a little, he realized that a lot depended on what _he_ did in the next few seconds. Of the complicated mix of emotions on Jack's face, uncertainty was starting to win.

"I think you need more samples," Daniel said, and kissed him back. 

There was still a moment's uncertainty as he sank into the kiss. They were in public, after all. But ... so what? No one could tell Jack was an android by looking at him, and even if they could, it wasn't illegal -- people took sexbots out for "dates" sometimes. As a gay teenager Daniel had learned caution in how open he was willing or able to be in public, but, for God's sake, he was a grown man with a gun and a badge, and the guy he was kissing could bench-press an automobile.

Still ... he felt a growing urge to get out of the bar and find someplace more private.

He broke the kiss long enough to ask, "You wanna blow this popsicle stand?"

 

***

 

In the car, it seemed that Jack was perfectly happy to carry on with the kissing experiment; and when Daniel eventually came up for air, he realized he'd had the car take him home instead of taking Jack back to the police station ... something he had absolutely no desire to do right now. Still ...

"We can go wherever you want," he said, words tumbling over each other as he tried to find the right ones. "I was thinking -- we could watch a movie at my place or something, I mean, the day isn't over yet, but I don't mean to imply that --"

"You're cute when you're flustered," Jack said, and kissed him again.

Daniel managed to retrieve his lips after a breathless minute or two. "Yes, but ..." He pushed Jack back gently, one hand on his chest, and Jack yielded to the light pressure, even though he was ten times as strong. "Just because we're here doesn't mean we have to stay here. Doesn't mean _you_ have to go here. I really need you to know that you don't have to come up with me or .... anything. Unless you want to."

"And what if I want to?" Jack asked softly, pushing back, until their faces were inches apart.

"Then -- you can. We can. Obviously." Daniel was lightheaded just from being close to him. How the hell did this _happen?_ It was far from the first time he'd fallen for someone, but he didn't remember feeling this out of control, like he'd been swept onto a runaway roller coaster, and now he was riding a wild blend of attraction and lust and a dazed wonder that this was actually happening to him. "I, uh ... I'd like you to come up, if you want to."

"I thought you'd never ask," Jack said, and debarked from the car, leaving Daniel staring after him.

Daniel caught up on the stairs out of the parking garage. This time, when he let them into his apartment, Jack looked around with open curiosity.

"I was serious about watching a movie," Daniel said. "You can pick. Just don't look up the ending this time."

Jack looked up from picking up and putting down various items on the countertop. "To make sure I'm not misreading the signs here, you _do_ want to have sex, correct?"

Daniel was pretty sure, from the heat of his face, that he'd blushed all the way up to his hairline. "Yes, but I don't want to -- did you just lick my coffeepot?"

Jack put it back down. "Sampling, that's all."

"Yeah, I figured. You'd happily go around licking the entire city, wouldn't you?"

Amusement sparkled in Jack's eyes. "I can also take samples through my fingertips," he said, holding up his hand and wiggling his fingers. "It's not quite as precise, though."

"I guess I should consider myself lucky you didn't just stick your fingers in my mouth, back in the bar."

Jack left off investigating the countertops, and crowded him into one corner of the kitchen, trapping him against the wall. "You'd have minded? Really?"

"No," Daniel said faintly, and proceeded to have his neck thoroughly molested. Jack's hair, he discovered, had a faint chemical smell, very like the taste Daniel had noticed while kissing him. It seemed to just be Jack's particular smell and taste.

It wasn't human at all, but Daniel liked it.

"I think," he said, weak-kneed, as he stroked his fingers through Jack's hair, "that we need to either -- God -- pick a movie, or --"

Jack nuzzled into his neck one more time, pulled back and grinned at him. "You taste different when you're aroused."

"Not surprising," Daniel managed. He applied light pressure to Jack's chest, and Jack allowed himself to be pushed back. The grin was becoming a little fiercer, and Daniel thought, _Hell._

"Any specific reason why you're putting the brakes on so hard, Sousa?"

"Yes," Daniel said, smoothing the collar of his open-necked shirt back into place. His neck still tingled in places. If he had hickeys, that was going to be hard to explain. "I want to take this slow enough that you have time to think about it. That we both do. I don't want to rush into anything we can't easily walk back from."

"You sure it's not just having sex with a robot that weirds you out?"

"For fuck's sake!" Daniel stepped forward; this time he was the one who got into Jack's personal space. He fisted his hands in Jack's hair and pulled Jack in for a long, hard, open-mouthed kiss. When he broke it off, he kept Jack there, holding him by the hair and resting his forehead against Jack's. He noticed peripherally that Jack's hands had come to settle on his waist.

"It's different," Daniel said softly. "I want to go slowly for your sake, and maybe for mine too. Damn it, Jack, I _like_ you, okay? I really do, you stubborn, chronically pissed-off asshole. And it's important to _me_ that you know you don't have to do this. I need you to be able to have all the opportunity in the world to change your mind. I need you to know that you _can_ say no."

"Daniel." This time Jack's voice was gentle, and it made Daniel pull back and look into his face. The hazel-gray-green eyes were alight with emotions, a complicated mix that no programmer could have ever thought to predict: amusement and fondness and arousal and a hint of the ever-present anger simmering down below. "When have I _ever_ done anything you told me to do without arguing about it?"

"... Good point." He still had his hands fisted in Jack's hair; now, releasing him, he touched the side of Jack's face and settled one hand against the human-feeling skin of his neck. "So let's watch a movie, and have a beer or two, and then you tell me if you still want it, okay?"

"Boy Scout," Jack scoffed, but he gave Daniel a quick closed-mouth kiss and broke away effortlessly.

Daniel got his breathing under control and went to see what he had in the way of beer.

He had three different kinds, and opened two different bottles for sampling purposes, which he brought over to the couch. Jack had brought up some kind of deadly boring-looking drama.

"Really?"

"You said I could choose. I chose."

"Fine," Daniel said, and after only a fraction of a second's indecision, he flopped down with his head in Jack's lap. He felt Jack freeze.

"See, this is the point," he said, lying on his back and looking up at Jack staring warily down at him. "I'm not having sex with you 'til you get a chance to do at least a couple of ordinary boyfriend things. Start the movie and taste a beer."

It was actually the first episode in an apparently never-ending drama about the residents of a large apartment complex, and Daniel found it exactly as boring as he'd thought it would be. However, he could see what interested Jack about it: the show was nonstop human social interaction. It also had a lot of sex, both gay and straight. Explicit sex. Daniel was starting to think Jack was sneakier than he'd given him credit for.

In spite of the show putting him to sleep while making him hornier than he'd thought possible, he was content. Jack spent most of the first episode seeming unsure where to put his hands, but as he relaxed a bit, he settled a hand on Daniel's head and began, slowly and cautiously, to pet his hair.

Daniel lay in his lap and drowsed, raising his head every once in a while for a sip from one of the beers getting warmer and flatter on the coffee table. Outside the window, it was getting dark, and the rain had started up again.

After the third sex scene between the main gay couple on the show, Daniel murmured, "You bastard."

Jack laughed. He cupped his hand lightly around Daniel's jaw, and brushed a thumb across his lips. "I've had time to think about it."

"Come to any conclusions?" Daniel asked, as Jack's warm fingertip stroked his lips.

"I've certainly got a few ideas." Jack took his hand away and began to unbutton Daniel's shirt.

Daniel pushed himself up on one arm to meet Jack's lips. Jack's kiss was hot, hungry, and wanting. And this time, Daniel allowed himself no doubts at all.

They stumbled into the bedroom, shedding clothing. It was the first time Daniel had seen Jack undressed, and he looked convincingly human, even in the way that his muscles slid under the skin. The only thing that was different was a complete lack of body hair; maybe no one had seen any point in bothering with that on a combat model below the neck. But his erection was perfectly realistic-looking. 

"Can you have an orgasm?" Daniel gasped against his mouth. Most of the blood that normally went to other parts of his body seemed to have all migrated south. "I mean -- I guess I'll find out, but --"

"Don't you ever stop talking?" Jack demanded, between kisses.

"I know, I just -- don't want to get off if _you're_ not getting off."

"Guess we'll both find out then, won't we?"

The words sank in, and Daniel stopped in mid-kiss. "Wait. Are you -- you're a _virgin?"_

"No, I'm a robot," Jack corrected him. "I don't think 'virgin' has any meaning here."

"But you've never had sex before."

"Wow, it's like you're some kind of detective or something," Jack drawled. "When _would_ I have, and with whom? C'mon, do I have to throw some more enthusiastic consent your way?"

"Nope. Lie down." Suiting action to words, Daniel pushed him down on the bed.

"Hey." Jack was starting to look nervous, but he went, even though he was easily strong enough to push Daniel off him. "What gives?"

"You just said it's your first time. We shouldn't be tearing off each other's clothes and fucking."

"I was fine with that."

"But it shouldn't be that way if you haven't done it before," Daniel said. He cupped Jack's cheek in his hand, and ran his fingers through Jack's hair. It felt human, and except for its slightly warmer temperature, Jack's skin felt human too. "I want to make this good for you."

Jack stared at him, and the baffled look faded slowly into something almost heartbreaking. "You. Want to make this good. For me."

"I've never been someone's first time before."

"I'm --"

"About to have a damn good time," Daniel said, and suiting actions to words, he leaned down to kiss Jack's mouth and jaw and neck.

It wasn't quite like making love to a human. Jack was stronger, for one thing; even in the grip of passion (and robots could have orgasms, as it turned out), he was careful, but it changed the way they moved together, in ways small and large. (At one point he lifted Daniel completely off the bed, which was both exciting and slightly terrifying.) And he didn't taste quite the same as a human partner, didn't smell quite the same; he didn't sweat.

But somewhere in the middle, Daniel stopped being aware of the differences on any level -- because it was _Jack,_ just Jack, and everything that made him different was what made him _him._

Also, it was hard to keep thinking when Jack was doing ... _that._ Or that. Or --

For a virgin, he was damned good at sex.

Also, one unexpected plus to having sex with an android: no refractory period. Daniel made him come four times, and he managed to push all thoughts out of his head about whether it was real pleasure or some kind of simulation -- because, when it came right down to it, a human orgasm was nothing but a chemical dump of endorphins and hormones into the bloodstream anyway. Jack was clearly having fun, and for android or human, it seemed, sex was still the most fun you could have with your clothes off.

They ended up tangled together, Daniel letting his breathing slow down while Jack nuzzled lightly and lazily against his neck. Jack's skin, always warm, was a little warmer than usual, and pink all over with a light flush. So he _did_ blush, in a way. Daniel wasn't sure if it was something he was doing on purpose and decided not to point it out. 

Instead, he mumbled, "Consider yourself deflowered."

Jack laughed softly, and, for a pleasant change, didn't argue about whether virginity counted for androids or not. Anyway, Daniel didn't want to overthink what afterglow actually meant for an android; he just wanted to enjoy it.

He only got to lie there and bask in it for a little while before Jack kissed his collarbone softly and sat up.

"Hey." Daniel rolled over and propped himself up on his elbow as Jack swung his legs off the side of the bed. "Where do you think you're going?"

"To recharge, genius," Jack said dryly. "Unless you want me to run down in the middle of our next case. I need to get dressed and go back to the station."

There was regret, though, in the way he ran his hand over Daniel's bare shoulder. Daniel caught it, feeling the inhuman strength in Jack's warm fingers. Jack could have broken Daniel's hold easily, but he didn't try.

"How does it work?" Daniel asked. "I mean, do you need the equipment there, or can you do it here?"

After the smallest of hesitations, Jack said, "The charging stations at the precinct are inductive. Like an electric toothbrush. I just need to touch the walls. But I also have ports in my hand and in my neck, if you have some kind of cable."

"I could probably come up with something." Daniel sat up and scrubbed at his face, trying to clear the sex-haze from his brain. "Check the closet. I think there's an extension cable in there. I need to take my leg off anyway. Documentation says you can wear it for days, but I'll regret it if I fall asleep with the damn thing on."

Jack, still gloriously naked, rummaged through the bedroom closet, while Daniel sat on the edge of the bed and pressed the set of little tabs around the edge of the top part of the cybernetic leg. There was a faint tingle as electrodes retracted and the "safe to remove" light turned green.

"Looks expensive," Jack remarked, turning around from the closet with a rolled-up cable in his hands. He added with a smirk, "Not as expensive as me, of course."

Daniel glanced up from wiping the top of the leg with an alcohol swab. "I volunteered for an experimental program. They're working on next-gen legs for the military and people in physically strenuous occupations." He placed it into its charger beside the bed, watching as it scanned the leg and all the lights turned reassuring green. It was probably very similar to Jack's charging station at the precinct, he thought, a little uncomfortable at that thought.

At which point he noticed Jack leaving the room. "Hey, where are you going?"

Jack gestured with the cable, looking uncomfortable. "Living room. You really want to sleep with a defunct robot standing in the corner?"

"I was actually hoping you'd recharge ... here," Daniel said. He patted the bed beside him. "I've slept alone for a long time. I was hoping not to tonight."

Jack stared at him for a minute. "It's not going to be like I'm sleeping," he said, his voice harsh. His gaze dropped away; his tone grew hesitant. "I'll be offline. Not breathing or moving. It'll be more like I'm dead."

"I can still wake you up, can't I? You're not completely shut down."

"It's not _sleep,_ Daniel," Jack snapped. "It's a recharge cycle. It's more like -- going to the bathroom, something like that. Or do you want me there when you take a dump, too?"

"I get that it's not sleep, okay?" Daniel shot back. "I don't expect it to look like sleep. Humans aren't exactly cuddly balls of delight when we sleep, either, no matter what TV would have you believe. We drool and fart and moan. If you don't want to deal with _that,_ I'll understand."

"I won't even know. I'll be shut down."

"So get over here and shut down, unless you want to argue about it all night." Daniel stretched out on his side and tried to look inviting.

"I thought sex was supposed to make humans calm and agreeable," Jack muttered. "Once again the media has lied to me." But he retraced his steps across the room and disconnected an unused bedside lamp to plug in his cable. He sat on the edge of the bed, with Daniel lying on his side behind him, and tapped the plug against his palm.

"I shouldn't have said that about your leg," he said suddenly.

"What?" Daniel's thoughts had been on a completely different track; he was temporarily derailed. Sifting through Jack's various insults took awhile. It had been generic cheap shots for the most part, though. The only time he could remember Jack saying anything about the leg ... "You mean all the way back at the Stark facility?"

Jack looked over his shoulder, his profile framed against the city lights behind the one-way glass of the bedroom window. "We aren't supposed to lie, but it's not strictly forbidden by our programming," he said. "We have to be able to go undercover, so telling the truth at all times isn't something we could be programmed to do. But we don't lie to our handlers. We aren't supposed to lie like _that."_

"What, you mean lashing out in anger, because you're hurt and scared and furious at the world, and now your leash has been handed off to another stranger without anybody asking you? We humans aren't supposed to do it either, but that's a thing people do. All kinds of people." Daniel reached out and tugged at him gently. "Come on, lie down and plug in the thing."

Jack lay down slowly, on his side with his back to Daniel. He reached a hand back, questing until he found what he was apparently after: the thigh of Daniel's injured leg. His hand rested there for a long moment, fingers caressing gently, before he took it away and did something in front of him with the power cable.

His shoulders went still; all animation drained out of him.

Even though Daniel was expecting it, he had to admit Jack was right; it _was_ a little strange. Cautiously, trying not to feel as if he was snuggling up to a corpse, Daniel aligned himself along Jack's back, just as if he were spooning with any sleeping lover and not one who was so perfectly, completely still.

At least Jack was still warm. _Good Lord,_ Daniel thought, _I hope he doesn't cool off during the night._ He really should have asked about that. He could handle it fine, he found, as long as he focused on the warmth of Jack's skin and the human-feeling resilience of it. Waking up next to someone who was _cold_ as well as corpse-still might be a little harder to take.

Well, they'd just have to figure it out as they went along, like the rest of it.

He closed his eyes and curled into Jack's warmth. Sleep came easily.

 

***

 

Daniel drifted awake in pleasant lassitude and opened his eyes to find himself being watched.

"Urgh." He had a feeling he'd been drooling. Wiping at his face, he found it was unfortunately true. "Observing the human in its natural habitat?"

"Something like that." Jack was propped on one elbow, chin in hand, wearing a soft smile that went all the way to his eyes and infused them with a gentle warmth. "The recharge cycle only takes about four to six hours, sometimes less depending on how discharged I am, and yesterday wasn't a strenuous day. Not as long as a human recharge cycle."

"What, you've been just lying there watching me sleep?"

"Well, it sounds creepy when you put it that way."

Daniel snorted. "I was more thinking you'd be bored."

"No," Jack said. He reached out and brushed a lock of hair away from Daniel's forehead. "Not bored at all."

Daniel flicked a glance at the clock. It was early yet. Maybe he could get away with drowsing another few minutes; he couldn't remember the last time he'd been this comfortable, this content --

His eyes snapped open at the sound of the outer door to the apartment opening. A female voice called, "Daniel?"

Jack straightened in an alarmingly martial way. 

"That's Peggy, not an intruder," Daniel said hastily, sitting up. "She's got a key to my place. She probably -- crap, where are my pants --"

Peggy appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. "Daniel? Oh --"

Daniel seized a handful of sheet and yanked it over himself. Jack sat up lazily, having relaxed out of his _Danger!_ pose, and smiled at her.

Peggy's gaze swept to Daniel, and it did not look approving. "Daniel," she said, in a very different tone.

Jack smiled wider. Daniel had a feeling that he was now blushing with his entire body. 

"Peggy, this isn't what it looks like."

"Actually, it's exactly what it looks like," Jack drawled.

"Would you shut up?" Daniel aimed a kick at him. "Peggy, please wait for me in the living room. I'll be out in a minute. I can't have this conversation naked. Uh, help yourself to whatever's in the fridge."

Peggy opened her mouth, closed it, and withdrew. "I'm looking forward to your explanation," she said as she closed the door.

"Put your clothes on." Daniel finally managed to locate a pair of underwear, which turned out not to be his, and threw it at his smirking bedmate.

A few minutes later -- very hastily showered and dressed, followed by a more subdued Jack -- he came out to the smell of perking coffee. Peggy was sitting at the kitchen island, reading her phone.

"You took a day off and went off the grid," she said, looking up. "You never do that, and I wanted to check that you weren't terribly ill. I suppose now I know why, but what I don't know --"

"No, you don't know why," Daniel interrupted. He grabbed his jacket off the back of a chair. "Peggy, I appreciate the coffee, but let's have breakfast. All three of us."

"I don't eat," Jack pointed out.

"No, but you taste. Have you had much opportunity to try breakfast foods?" He was going to go out on a limb and guess that, however close Angie had been to her partner, she probably hadn't taken him out to restaurants much.

"No," Jack admitted.

"Well, there you go." Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Peggy following the byplay with a bemused expression. "C'mon, there's a decent cafe a couple blocks over. We can walk to it."

"I left Colleen in the car," Peggy said. She slid off her stool and smiled at Jack, recovering her poise. "Jack, I can bring my CX unit if you'd like to have some Synthetic company in addition to ours."

Daniel was highly attuned, by now, to the way Jack's face shifted and lost emotion when he was confronted by a situation he didn't want to be in. "Jack," he said, "if you don't want Colleen there, we won't bring Colleen. It is _entirely_ up to you." He placed extra emphasis on the qualifier.

Jack glanced up at him. "I'd prefer not to have her there."

"Sorry, Peggy. Colleen's staying in the car. She won't mind." Or notice the passage of time at all, except in a purely utilitarian sense.

"I ... see." Peggy looked between them, and her smile grew slowly. "Take us to this cafe, Daniel. I'm looking forward to it."

They walked together to the restaurant, not talking much; despite Peggy's attempts at making light conversation with Daniel, there was a sense of expectancy between them, a burgeoning awareness of things unsaid. At a street crossing, Daniel hung back and stopped Jack with a hand. "I think she should read your file," he said quietly. 

Peggy looked back, noticing they were no longer immediately behind her, but made no effort to close the gap between them. She was good at reading that sort of thing.

"Do what you want," Jack said, with a tight shrug. 

"Jack, it's up to you. Your decision. For what it's worth, I think your file will tell her more about you than I could if I talked all day. That's what made _me_ realize that you're different from the CX's. And you _are,_ so don't argue," he added; he could see the counterarguments already being written behind Jack's guarded expression. "But I'm not going to have her poking into your past without your permission."

Jack's face remained set in firm, stony lines for a moment before he said, "You trust her."

"Yes," Daniel said. "I do."

"If you trust her, I trust that," Jack said with a simple honesty that lodged somewhere in Daniel's chest.

In the cafe, the human waitress brought them three menus; Jack's wristlets were hidden under his sleeves as usual. "Order what you want," Daniel told him. "I don't care if there's a little waste. Besides, you haven't seen Peggy pack away food, and I know her well enough to know she probably grabbed a travel mug of tea on the way out the door and called it breakfast."

"How very wrong you are," Peggy said, studying her menu. "It was tea and a slightly stale bagel."

"The breakfast of champions," Daniel said as the waitress came back and filled their coffee cups, or at least his and Jack's; Peggy left hers upside-down and requested tea.

Jack ordered the "farmer breakfast," Daniel assumed on the general principle that he got the most variety of different kinds of foods that way. Daniel decided to get a side of toast and steal most of Jack's food. As Peggy placed her order, she kept looking at the two of them as if her assumptions were being recalibrated by the minute.

Daniel nudged Jack's shoulder -- they were sitting side by side in the booth, with Peggy across from them -- before looking at Peggy. "I guess you probably know this isn't _just_ breakfast," he said. "There are some things we need to talk to you about --" And he felt Jack's reaction to that _we,_ a slight ripple that passed through his arm where it rested against Daniel's. "-- but first, you should look up Jack's file. At least skim it. I think it's better if you see for yourself."

Peggy read on her phone while they waited for their food. Jack entertained himself by sampling everything on the table, including Peggy's tea, and Daniel entertained himself by watching Jack.

"The way you're acting today," Jack said with a sort of forced levity, not looking at Peggy across the table as she read with a frown, "I can see why I had to do everything short of knocking you over the head and dragging you off to the bedroom last night. You attach _hard,_ don't you?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Jack grinned and tore open a packet of artificial sweetener.

Peggy cleared her throat and set her phone down. "I'm not comfortable reading any more of this."

Jack's posture tightened, and the playful amusement dropped away; Daniel saw, in that instant, how hard he'd been fighting to maintain a facade of levity. His smile twisted into something that was as sharp as a blade. "Lose your appetite before you even got to the good bits, Marge?"

"No," Peggy said. She leaned back as the waitress put their plates in front of them, and moved hers to the side as soon as the woman was gone, so that she could lean forward to say quietly, "I got far enough to realize that if you want me to know any of the rest of what's in those files, you'll tell me. I'm not going to read them with you sitting there."

A knot in Daniel's chest eased, and he laid his hand on Jack's tense arm. "You see what I mean, though?"

"I do." Peggy's attention was focused fully on Jack. "You really aren't like the others, are you?"

"Hell, I don't know," Jack said. He was back in fully prickly defensive mode. He didn't acknowledge Daniel's hand on his arm, but at least he didn't shrug it off. "It's all sophisticated programming, or so they tell me. An electronic lie."

"Yeah, and if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you in Arizona," Daniel muttered, and jabbed his fork into Jack's scrambled eggs.

"I may regret asking this," Peggy said, reaching for her own plate as she watched Jack drench his pancakes in syrup. "But why did you order that much food? You can't eat it."

Jack shrugged, dipped his fork in the syrup, and licked it.

"He likes tasting things," Daniel said. He didn't particularly want to speak for Jack as if he wasn't there, but Jack seemed to have downshifted an emotional gear for the time being. "I think it's sort of a hobby."

"You have hobbies," Peggy said. "But of course you do. I'm sorry; it shouldn't have surprised me."

Jack looked up from heavily salting a small square of his pancake, gazed at her for a moment, and then stole a decorative orange wedge off the corner of her plate; his didn't have one.

"It's remarkable," Peggy marveled. "Everything you've done, all the ways you've alienated everyone at the station -- You've convinced them all so thoroughly that there's something truly _wrong_ with you that you can do almost anything, and no one sees what's right under their noses. No one sees _you."_

Daniel gave Jack a sharp look. He'd never thought about it that way. But then, people were something Peggy was good at.

And Jack was, beyond a doubt, a person.

 

***

 

Jack had relaxed a lot by the time they finished eating. In fact, he and Peggy were getting along to a degree that made Daniel nervous, because he'd seen how reckless Jack could be, and how reckless Peggy could be, and he could only imagine what kinds of things they'd get up to if they started encouraging each other.

But they liked each other, and that set a warm glow spreading through him. Peggy liked Jack. Peggy _believed_ him about Jack.

He and Jack weren't alone in this. And he knew what a formidable ally Peggy could be.

And it was such a massive, massive relief to have someone to talk to about it.

"I'm not sure where to go from here," he admitted quietly to Peggy as they left the restaurant. Jack was a little way of them, vigilant and alert for threats -- giving them space to talk alone, or just carving out some space for himself; it was hard to say. "Obviously on some level we're just going to keep going on as we have been. I'll go out in the field with Jack as my partner. I trust him at my back more now than I ever did when I thought he was a next-generation CX, and a glitchy one at that. But ... he's not a machine, he's a person, and he's stuck in a world where he's thought of as a tool at best, a defective tool at worst. I don't know how to protect him or make things better for him."

"For one thing, slow down," Peggy said with a laugh. "You can't fix all the ills of the world overnight. Or singlehandedly."

"Excuse me?" Daniel cupped his ear with one hand. "Is that _Peggy Carter_ talking? The one and only Detective Margaret Carter, professional tilter at windmills?"

She batted his hand down and looked exasperated. "Perhaps it's the voice of experience talking. Take it slowly, Daniel. You said it yourself: keep going on as you have. Think. Plan. Research. I'll talk to Jason and see what else Stark Industries has been working on. Jack might not be unique after all. But for now ..." She tugged playfully at his collar; now it was Daniel's turn to bat her off. "Live your life. Have fun. I don't remember the last time I saw you this happy."

"I'm not _un_ happy," he protested.

"No, you aren't, but you're also a workaholic with no personal life. I thought you must be ill because you took a day off. If Jack makes you happy --"

"What are you two doing back there, exchanging recipes?" Jack called back impatiently.

"... then heaven help you," Peggy said, but her eyes danced. She leaned up and kissed him on the cheek.

They went their separate ways in front of Daniel's apartment building. Peggy paused to take Jack's hand, to his obvious surprise. "I realize the last time you came out for drinks with the lot of us, it didn't go well," she said. "You're welcome back anytime you like, though. And Daniel and I sometimes grab a drink after work, just the two of us. That might be a little more to your liking."

"I'll ... think about it?" 

He watched her walk away jauntily, with a spring in her step, toward her police cruiser with Colleen in it, which had pulled up to the curb to pick her up.

"Told you she'd handle it okay," Daniel said, letting them into the lobby.

"Smug is not a good look on you." 

Daniel snorted. "And now I'm late for work. I'm _never_ late for work. You're already a terrible influence on me."

He unlocked the door to the stairs leading down to the underground parking garage, where his car was, and took the steps two and three at a time on the artificial leg. He felt _good,_ light and free and happy. He was already into the parking garage before he noticed Jack was following more slowly. 

"What's with you?" he asked when Jack stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

"This ..." Jack moved a hand between them.

When he didn't go on, Daniel raised his eyebrows. "Yes, and?"

"Where's it gonna _go,_ Sousa?" Jack asked impatiently, retreating behind the familiar layer of defensive anger once again. "You know my lifespan's probably measured in weeks right now, don't you?"

"The _fuck_ it is." His own vehemence startled him. "I told you I'm not going to let them wipe you, and I mean it."

"You might not have a choice."

"I think you're underestimating how stubborn I can be," Daniel said, and this coaxed a small, reluctant smile out of Jack. "And you've got Hurricane Peggy on your side now. She even knows the Starks. And Angie's been working on your behalf for years. You've got friends, Jack."

"I don't think you get what you're up against. Think ahead, Sousa --"

"Do we have to?" He took a cautious step forward, then another, and put his arms around Jack -- aware, as he did it, that Jack was strong enough to snap his wrists. But Jack made no move to break his hold, and when Daniel kissed him lightly, his lips were responsive. 

Daniel broke the kiss and rested his cheek against Jack's, eyes closed, for a long moment. Jack's hand came up hesitantly to settle on his back.

"You're not wrong," Daniel admitted quietly, as they leaned into each other. "We've got one hell of an uphill climb ahead of us. But ... all the more reason not to borrow trouble before it comes, don't you think? Let's just take it a day at a time for awhile. Try not to overthink it."

Jack laughed softly, a huff against his ear of breath that wasn't quite breath. "I think a million times faster than you do. I'm not capable of _not_ overthinking things."

"Excuses." Daniel pushed away, somewhat reluctantly; he could happily have taken another day off, spent the whole day in bed beside Jack. He turned his thoughts away from that pleasant temptation. "Come on. Work to do."

He led the way to the car. As Daniel opened the driver's-side door, Jack paused, his head tilted slightly.

"What?"

"Emergency alert in our area," Jack said, reminding Daniel that he was always online, never quite out of touch. "Check your radio."

Daniel thumb-activated the touch-panel in the car. Jack was right; another bomb threat, not too far away. "In _my_ neighborhood," he muttered. "Assholes."

He called in to let them know another car was on the way, and guided by the police dispatcher's directions to the car, they pulled into the parking lot of an upscale shopping plaza. It was exactly the sort of place the Gloved Hand _would_ target, Daniel thought: the gleaming steel-and-glass architecture of the shopping center, with the towers of tenements looming over it, was like an illustration of the contrast between the haves and have-nots of the modern world. A cordon had already been set up; cruisers were parked around it, lights flashing, and Daniel spotted Li and Yauch working to clear civilians out of the area. 

"What's the sitrep?" Daniel called over the roof of his cruiser to Li.

"Bomb squad's on the way," Li called back. "Location of the bomb is unknown, if there even _is_ a bomb. We're just trying to get everybody out of the way. Our CX's are inside, sweeping the place for any civilians that were overlooked in the initial evac; yours should go too."

Daniel didn't see Peggy anywhere. She usually worked as an investigator on far-flung field cases, so hopefully she'd been headed out to one of those. There was always the likelihood it was a threat with no teeth behind it, but he couldn't stop thinking about the last time he'd gotten called in on a bomb threat. Smoke and fire, the shock of impact, the smell of scorched electronics ...

"Stay there and wait for me," Daniel told Jack. Li was wearing light body armor, and Daniel reached behind the seat to pull out his vest. As he buckled it over his street clothes, he looked up and discovered Jack was gone.

Asshole.

"Jack, get your ass back here," Daniel ordered over the radio.

There was no answer. Daniel was going to _kill_ him.

"Li, I'm doing the east wing, all right?" Without waiting for a response, he jogged across the parking lot, past clumps of well-dressed, panicked-looking civilians. "Jack," he snapped into the radio. "I'm coming in, so tell me where the hell _you_ are, unless you want me to activate your tracker and hunt you down that way."

"Stay out there," Jack said over the radio. "It's not safe. This is what we're _for._ We're faster, stronger, and more durable."

 _And replaceable,_ hung unspoken between them. But Jack sure as hell wasn't, and Daniel had another too-vivid flash of Chex's shattered face and torn-apart body -- only this time, it was Jack's blond hair ripped out and scattered along with smoking electronics all over the ground.

He thumbed the control on his radio to switch to Jack's private frequency rather than the shared one. "We're partners, all right? I know that doesn't quite mean what it used to, but it does to me. You've got my back, and I've got yours. So _tell me where you are."_

There was no answer. _I'm going to kill him, I really am._ Daniel checked the tracking data on his phone and located Jack on the second level of the mall.

At the door, he went in past two panicked teenagers being herded out by one of the CX's. "Any more inside?" he asked it.

"Not that I know of, Detective."

There was an eerie, apocalyptic feeling to the abandoned shopping center. Stores stood open, but empty of shoppers or clerks. A shopping bag from a high-end boutique, dropped by its panicked owner, lay abandoned on a bench; discarded coffee cups were scattered across the floor. Daniel wandered from store to store, calling inside, and in the process realizing the futility of trying to find a bomb that was probably no larger than a suitcase or backpack in a place this size. It wasn't really possible with regular human senses. Synthetics, on the other hand, could scan for chemical traces of explosives --

Shit. "Jack, are you looking for civilians, or are you looking for the bomb up there?"

He wasn't expecting an answer at this point, but he got one. "Both; aren't you? And you shouldn't be in here."

"Oh, but _you_ should?" Daniel poked his head into the restrooms. A bright red purse had been abandoned beside one of the sinks. He checked the stalls and found nothing suspicious.

Jack hadn't bothered to answer. Daniel checked the tracker again and found Jack right above him, probably checking restrooms on the second level.

"Sousa!" Dooley's voice snapped over his radio, cutting into the private channel on priority override. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"Checking for civilians, sir." An awful thought occurred to him about the red purse. He approached it cautiously, trying very hard not to think about that moment when the world had dissolved in smoke and noise, and the blunt impact of Chex's mechanical body against his.

"Get out of there, Detective Sousa. In case it wasn't clear, that's an order."

"Good luck with that, sir," Jack's dry voice said over the radio. "Doing what he's told isn't exactly his strong suit."

Daniel smiled slightly as he reached out from as far away as he could manage and flipped up the purse's flap.

"Who the hell is this?"

"JK-1070, sir," Jack said in a tone that was a little less flippant and a little more (marginally) respectful. There was a brief, startled silence on the other end of the radio, during which Daniel determined that the purse contained nothing except makeup and tampons.

"I should've retired years ago," Dooley groused over the radio. "Insubordinate detectives, god damn insubordinate _robots_ ... Sousa, get your fucking ass back here _now."_

He drew back his hands from the purse, noticing only then that they were shaking, and his whole body had broken out in a cold sweat. "I'll be out of here when all the civilians are clear, sir."

"Damn it, man, that's the job of the CX units."

"Is it?" Daniel demanded, as he exited the restrooms. "Didn't it used to be _our_ job -- putting ourselves in danger to keep people safe? Maybe that's one reason why people aren't fond of us these days. Maybe we need to remember we're all in this together, part of the same community, not a bunch of cowboys with guns who swoop in from outside when there's a problem and let our Synthetics take all the risk for us." He thumbed off the radio before Dooley could answer -- or Jack.

"He's right, you know," Jack called down from the mezzanine, because a small thing like turning off the radio wasn't going to shut him up. "You shouldn't be in here. You could be risking your job, not to mention your life."

"I'll leave when you do," Daniel shot back. "Bomb squad will be here soon, anyway. I think we've got everyone out ..."

Having now circled around to near the place where he'd come in, he noticed once again the abandoned shopping bag on its bench. In his initial sweep he hadn't thought much about it, but now, given his suspicions about the purse, it seemed more prominent than it had before. _Leave it for the bomb squad,_ he told himself, but even as the thought crossed his mind, he was already crossing to the bench.

"What are you doing down there?" Jack called down.

"My job," Daniel murmured, but not loudly, because he was very carefully opening the bag.

A second later he jumped back like he'd been stung by a swarm of hornets. Damn thing was half full of a snarl of electronics and explosives, with a timer on top running rapidly down to zero. They had seconds, no more.

"Jack, get out!"

Instead, Jack hit the floor mere feet from him, having jumped off the mezzanine. And Daniel knew exactly what Jack was about to do because it was what Chex had done.

_Protect human life at all costs._

_Protect your partner's life at all costs._

But even though Jack's reflexes were faster, Daniel was equally determined, and Jack didn't expect it. Daniel rolled himself in front of his partner as the bomb detonated.

There was a great burst of light and noise, an impact like being kicked, and then the world had tilted sideways and his head was resting on something and Jack's voice was frantically saying his name, audible only faintly through his ringing ears.

The riot armor had caught most of it, he thought dazedly. Without it -- like Jack was without it -- he'd have been flayed by shrapnel. And Jack could probably have handled it, could have been repaired ... but there was still that chance of a sharp-edged piece of shrapnel tearing through his delicate neural circuitry, shorting it out, killing the light of anger and intelligence in his eyes forever. Leaving him staring sightlessly, like Chex's one intact, sightless eye, staring into nothing ...

He'd told himself that Chex had flung himself over the bomb because his programming told him to do it, but how true was that, really? It wouldn't have been why Jack did it ... at least, no more so than any human could be considered programmed by their instincts and morality ...

"Daniel!" Jack's voice was a little clearer now, sounding like it came from the bottom of a well. Fingers scrabbled at his vest, and then Jack engaged his android strength and simply ripped off the buckles. This yanked at the vest, jerking Daniel's torso, and he screamed as a white sheet of pain tore through him.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry." Jack's voice didn't shake, like a human's would have under stress; instead there was a staccato start and stop to it, as if he kept forgetting words. "You're so fragile, so breakable, you humans. All of you. You shouldn't have been in here at all. _Why did you do that?"_

One of Jack's hands was pressed against the side of his head, clamped down painfully hard, and it wasn't until he moved his head that Daniel realized Jack was pressing down on some kind of head wound. There was blood all over the place, on Jack's lap and spattered across the front of his suit. Human blood. _Mine,_ he thought dazedly. Jack's other hand was clamped against his side under his arm, and Daniel didn't want to know what it was doing down there -- holding in his guts? How bad was he hurt, really?

He tried to ask, but all that emerged from his smoke-seared throat was a raspy croak.

"You break so easily." Jack's voice was ragged, twisted up with emotion. "I'm supposed to protect _you._ That's what I'm for."

Daniel managed to muster the strength to speak, and he whispered, "But who's going to protect _you?"_

The effort it had taken to say the words felt like it ripped something sharp through his chest, and then there was nothing but fragments: the roof of an ambulance, white corridors, bits and pieces and flashes. At some point Peggy was there, her fingers laced through his. He could still taste blood and smoke, now overlaid with the hospital smell of chemical cleaners that he remembered all too well from when he'd lost his leg.

Things faded in and out. He was on a roller coaster of drugs and painkillers, surfacing enough to catch bits and pieces of the waking world: a nurse leaning over him, changing his IV; someone doing something with his side, and pain down there somewhere, under a muffling layer of drugs.

And later, like a dream ...

Like a dream, he thought Jack was there, leaning in close, holding his hand. Jack spoke softly, his lips near Daniel's ear, his cheek brushing Daniel's face.

"I'm supposed to protect you. That's my whole purpose. This isn't how it's supposed to go."

A long pause, during which he floated on the drugs, and then Jack's lips brushed his cheek lightly.

"That's why you cops have robot partners in the first place," Jack's voice murmured, the words drifting down to find Daniel in his haze of meds. "It's too dangerous out there for a human alone. You should have a real one, a proper one -- a robot partner who will keep you safe, not one that you go getting yourself hurt _for._ You deserve to have that. I can't do it. I guess today proves that having me around just makes you less safe."

Somewhere under the meds, Daniel tried to struggle to the surface. Fear was glimmering in his subconscious, bright as bioluminescent deep-sea fish hunting their prey down there in the dark.

"Guess this was going to happen sooner or later anyway. I've been living on borrowed time, and I knew it. Maybe if I'm lucky ... maybe after ... they'll partner us again. I won't know it, but you will."

He kissed Daniel softly on the lips, and Daniel sank back into the darkness and madness of narcotic-induced dreams.

 

***

 

Daniel woke with a jolt from a haze of dreams, his heart racing. One dream overrode the others with a blinding urgency, and he lay blinking his bleary, gummed-together eyes and trying to put things together. He was in the hospital; the lights were dimmed, but he knew a hospital room when he saw one. Slowly he pieced everything together: the bomb, protecting Jack ...

Jack, holding his hand and talking to him.

He'd dreamed it, hadn't he?

_Oh God, I hope I dreamed it._

He fumbled for the bed controls and raised the head of the bed, then waited out a head rush. While he was waiting for the headache to clear enough that he could sit up properly, he patted himself down, finding a shaved and bandaged place across his temple, and swaths of bandaging on his right side. He couldn't draw a deep breath without pain stabbing through his chest. From the way he felt, he guessed that he'd cracked or broken some ribs from the impact, and shrapnel must have gone in through the gap in the riot armor under his arm. Not to mention the head wound, which was making the world spin and his stomach churn every time he moved.

But worry for Jack made him sicker than the concussion. The important thing right now was making sure that Jack hadn't gone to do what Daniel was terrified that he had already done.

He had to hunt around for his phone, and found it, finally, on a shelf beside the bed -- and inaccessible _from_ the bed, so he had to sit up and swing his legs (one full leg, one truncated one) over the side. Sticky leads tugged at his skin, and he gripped the sides of the bed until the room stopped rocking like the deck of a ship. Then he retrieved the phone and called Peggy.

"Daniel? You're awake!"

Daniel started talking over the top of her delighted voice. "Peggy, I need you to find Jack. I need you to look up his tracker."

"What's wrong?"

"No time. Look him up for me, Peggy. Please."

"It'll take a minute," she said. "Let me bring up the police system."

Daniel waited in a snarled ball of tension. His head ached horribly. He found a cup of water beside the bed, lukewarm with a straw in it, and took a few sips before his stomach cramped and he put it back down.

"He's at Stark Industries, it looks like," Peggy reported. "Why is he there, Daniel; what happened?"

"No, no, no." Daniel closed his eyes. "Peggy, he was here earlier. He talked to me, except I was too out of it to know I wasn't dreaming it. He blames himself for what happened to me. He ... I think he's going to have himself wiped. It _can't_ be too late -- Peggy, I need to get over there."

"You need to be in the hospital."

His heart was triphammering so fast it was going to be setting off alarms at the nurse's station. He began ripping off the leads connected to his chest. There was an IV in his arm and he stared at it, trying to figure out how to disconnected the port while his headache spiked to migraine levels.

"Daniel!" Peggy said sharply over the phone. There were rustlings in the background, and he heard a male voice ask a question.

Wilkes. Right. Peggy was at home, and she was with her boyfriend. "Peggy, tell Jason what's going on. He might be able to stop it. And _you_ need to pick me up at the hospital as soon as you can get over here." He clutched at the raised head of the bed and gritted his teeth through a wave of dizziness that nearly sent him to the floor.

"Daniel, you are not leaving the hospital." He heard clatters and the brisk tap of her heels. Peggy was no slouch in the action department. "Jason and I will handle this."

"The hospital is right on the way from your apartment to the Stark facility. I'll be downstairs waiting for you. If you're not here by the time I get down there, I'm calling a cab."

"Daniel --"

He hung up on her, and focused on clenching his teeth against the incipient nausea as he got out of bed. He had to hop on one leg -- each lurch sending a tearing stab of pain through his head and chest -- to locate his artificial leg in the closet. It wasn't plugged in and the charge was low, but it would get him around. Better than hopping, at any rate.

The door cracked open and light spilled in from the hallway. "Mr. Sousa, your vitals are -- why are you out of bed?"

"I'm leaving." Daniel looked for his pants and couldn't find any. His clothes must have been a wreck, and it was clear that Peggy hadn't gotten around to bringing him more. Oh well, he'd experienced worse indignities than driving across the city in a hospital gown. He snatched a folded blanket off a shelf.

"You need to get back to bed." The nurse moved in on him.

No sidearm either. Damn it. "Out of my way," Daniel said, pushing her aside as he strode for the door. "I'm checking out."

"Mr. Sousa, you aren't even _dressed_ \-- Mr. Sousa, get back here --"

With the blanket folded around him like a cape, Daniel looked around to get his bearings. The light in the corridor seemed much too bright, a knife blade stabbing into his eyes. He found the sign for the elevator and walked that way as fast as he was capable of. The leg was a big help; its natural stabilizers helped keep him upright when he started to list.

"Sir, you cannot leave in your condition!" he heard the nurse say behind him. "Security --!"

_Peggy, I'm counting on you. Don't let me down._

No one managed to accost him before he got in the elevator. He rode down to the first floor, and half-walked, half-staggered out to the sidewalk just as Peggy's car pulled in.

"Oh my God, Daniel," Peggy said, leaping out to help him into the back. "You look awful. I can't believe they let you check out -- Where are your clothes?"

"Probably in an incinerator. Someone forgot to bring me more." He sank into the backseat and leaned his head back, closing his eyes. Dimly he was aware that there was someone else in the front seat -- Jason, no doubt. "Step on it."

"You didn't exactly _check_ out, did you." Peggy slid in beside him, and Jason moved over to the driver's seat. Cars drove themselves, but it was still illegal not to have a capable driver behind the wheel, for various antiquated reasons.

"Go, go! Am I the only person who cares that Jack's life is at stake?"

Jason twisted around in the driver's seat as the car pulled away from the curb, resting his arms on the seat back. "Daniel, I don't know if you entirely understand that Jack, as you call him, is a machine."

"Jason, so help me, I like you, but if you say that again, I _will_ hit you."

"Daniel, calm down," Peggy murmured, patting his shoulder. "Jason, I know you're an expert and we aren't. But I've spoken to Jack. I've interacted with him. I truly believe that the JK line are different from the others. Have you dealt with their architecture at all?"

"No," Jason said. "I haven't. That doesn't mean -- Listen, we don't have true AI yet. Even the DRN models --"

"Jason," Daniel said, his eyes snapping open, "did you miss what I said about my fist and your face?"

Peggy gave him a small shake, which jarred his throbbing head and made his headache spike to the point where he nearly lost his battle against nausea. "Daniel, _stop._ Jason is helping us. We can't get in without him, and he knows where to go. Stop fighting with people on our side and relax."

Daniel gave up and sank limply into the seat. Everything hurt, his heart most of all.

_Jack, I'm so fucking sorry I didn't hear what you were really saying. If you're all right, I'll make it up to you. I'll make it up to you every goddamn day. Just please, please be all right. Please still be YOU._

The car pulled into the Stark Industries parking garage. Daniel scrambled for the door, then clung to the side of the car while dizziness swamped him. Peggy's warm, strong hands settled on him. He'd lost the blanket inside, but something warm settled over him: a coat that he thought at first was Peggy's, but realized then, from the fact that it fit over his shoulders, was probably Jason's.

"Jason, once we're inside, can you go ahead?" Peggy asked, helping Daniel away from the car. He held onto her, teeth gritted as dark spots bloomed in his vision, willing himself not to pass out or throw up.

"I can't," Jason's voice said, seeming to come from far away and underwater. "Unless I leave you behind completely. You need my employee badge to get through the doors."

That was what gave Daniel the strength to raise his head and hurry his footsteps, consequences to his health be damned. "Then let's go."

At this hour of the night, the corridors of the building were empty and silent. Lights came on as they passed and went off behind them. Blearily, Daniel recognized the same sublevels where he had been before -- the morgue, where he'd first met Jack, although he hadn't even recognized it as a first meeting at the time.

_I'm so, so sorry it took me so long to see you ..._

He held onto Peggy, letting her aid his flagging footsteps. They had to stop while Jason took out his phone and ran a quick check.

"Looks like he's in Lab C." Jason looked up, meeting Peggy's worried gaze with a frown. "Reformatting and conditioning."

Daniel swayed sideways, catching himself on the wall.

"Daniel!" Peggy got hold of him again. "Daniel, we don't know anything yet. You look absolutely white. Are you sure you don't need to sit --"

"No!" Daniel snapped through gritted teeth. He forced himself forward, his synthetic leg carrying him while the left one tried to buckle.

Jason unlocked another door. They entered a long room with a series of lab tables, stretching out towards the far wall. Most of them were empty, but a few had Synthetics in various states of disassembly. Daniel averted his eyes from their half-stripped corpses, his unstable stomach lurching again.

 _They're machines,_ he told himself, but he wasn't sure if he could ever see any of them as a machine again. Not after Jack.

And there was a glint of blond hair, some ways down the row of tables. Daniel stumbled, catching himself on the wall, and broke into a staggering run.

He half-fell to a stop beside the lab table containing Jack. The JK-1070 was back in a blue jumpsuit and lay as if asleep or dead, his eyes closed.

"Jack," Daniel said, touching his face. _"Jack."_ The artificial skin was cold; it felt waxy and plastic. Nothing at all like his warm, responsive skin when he was --

_(alive)_

\-- awake.

"He's powered down." Jason's hands moved, touching Jack behind the ear. "I'm doing a fast reboot, all right?"

"Will it hurt him?" Daniel asked anxiously.

"No, though he should do a system check once he's back online." Jason looked around and took a wandlike tool from one of the benches, holding it over Jack's forehead. Readouts on the tool flickered, numbers flashing faster than Daniel's blurred vision could register them.

"How long is this going to take?" Daniel asked. Peggy tried to steer him to lean on one of the unused lab tables, but he resisted.

"He'll be online in a minute." Jason was still studying the readouts. He swept the wand in a slow arc across Jack's forehead, and his frown of concentration deepened.

"What?" Daniel demanded, but just then Jack's eyes snapped open -- those familiar, gray-green eyes.

"Jack." Daniel fell against the lab table. "Jack." He patted Jack's cheek. It was warming up, the skin temperature coming back up to human normal.

"Daniel," Jason said. There was a heavy note in his voice. On some level Daniel registered it, but refused to acknowledge it.

Jack sat up with a suddenness that made Daniel take a stumbling step backward. The open, color-shifting eyes gazed out at the room, then turned to Daniel with a chilly lack of recognition. Flat. Dead. Empty.

"I am JK-1070," Jack said -- no, not Jack. It was Jack's voice and it wasn't: the same rough timbre, but without the flair, without the anger and all that lay beneath it. "I await your instructions."

Daniel staggered for a completely different reason. Peggy had to catch him.

He didn't have to be told. He knew. The JK-1070's eyes were flat and calm, lacking the spark of intensity, of _presence_ , that had been one of the first things Daniel had noticed, even before he knew what Jack was.

 _Who_ Jack was.

"This is the wrong one," he said, his voice hoarse. "There's a whole line of JK units, isn't it? This is -- this is one of the other ones."

"There aren't any other ones, not anymore." Jason's voice was soft and sympathetic; that was, perhaps, the worst part. "The JK-1070 was the last of his line."

Daniel stared in growing horror and a terrible, burgeoning grief at this ... this _thing,_ this blank-eyed monster that wore the dead face of someone he loved.

"No," he said. He hardly recognized his own voice.

"Daniel," Peggy said gently.

"No, they couldn't have -- couldn't have done it so quickly, could they? There must be -- somewhere, in his system, I don't know the right words, but couldn't there be vestiges, can't you retrieve ..." He was grasping at straws and he knew it, but he couldn't _not._ He still couldn't grasp the magnitude of what had happened.

All that Jack was, all of that bright intelligence, that anger, that guilt and defensiveness, all of his coping mechanisms and his strange little quirks -- all of that, wiped away in an instant.

He couldn't be gone.

Everyone had called Jack defective, but all Daniel saw in those defects was humanity. Jack was sarcastic, flawed, angry, insulting, guilty -- _human._ Jack had been a person, as much as any human Daniel had ever known. And now ... now ...

Daniel stared at the JK-1070's flat, perfect face, waiting for it to show even the slightest flicker of humanity. Something. _Anything._ Waiting for it to frown, or glare at him, or insult him.

There was nothing. It was perfectly flat and blank.

"It's still the same ... same brain though, isn't it?" he asked. His voice sounded tiny and fragile. "It can learn again. It can ... it can make all those connections that it made the first time. It can be a person again."

But even as he said it, he saw the flaw -- the giant, black-hole-sized flaw in his reasoning. Maybe it could. But that four-year tour with Angie, all those experiences large and small that had made Jack who he was, all of the guilt and the frustration and the coping mechanisms -- none of that would be there. This JK unit might be able to grow a new consciousness in place of the old, but Jack was gone. It would never be Jack again.

Jack was gone.

Jack was dead.

Daniel turned into Peggy's shoulder, away from the flat eyes like agates, so like Jack's and yet nothing at all like them. He leaned into Peggy and thought at first that his eyes were dry, that there were no tears in him for this. But then it came, a series of wrenching sobs, every one tearing at his injuries with agony that brought him close to passing out.

He welcomed the pain. He couldn't help feeling that he deserved it. All he could think was, _I failed him. I failed._

_Jack, you fucking suicidal bastard. It wasn't your fault._

His fingers clenched on Peggy's blouse. He was crying all over her shoulder, he was turning into a complete mess, probably going to rupture some stitches if he didn't hold it down, and he didn't even care.

_I just want to tell you that it wasn't your fault._

There was a conversation going on between Peggy and Jason over his head. He registered none of it except for the distant drone of their voices, until Peggy gripped his shoulders and pushed him back. "Daniel," she said sharply. "Daniel, listen to me. Look at me. Daniel?"

He dragged the back of his hand across his face. "I'm sorry," he said, and wasn't entirely sure if he was talking to her or to Jack ... to Jack's corpse, rather, that was sitting up and looking at them.

He understood now why Jack found the CX and JX's creepy. God, did he ever understand.

"Daniel," Peggy said firmly, drawing his wavering attention back to her. "Jason says that there's something he can try. Before they reformat any Synthetic, they do a complete backup in case something goes wrong, and it might still be in storage if they haven't purged it yet. Daniel, are you listening to me? _They back them up."_

"All right," Daniel said, dazed. "All right, I -- how? I mean, how does that --"

"Yes!" Jason crowed from across the room. Daniel hadn't even been aware of him moving away. "Hold on, guys. Don't move a muscle."

He sprinted back over from the console where he'd been working, and tapped the wand tool to the JK-1070's ear. It folded down obediently and closed its eyes.

Jason pulled down a fat cable, thumbed open the neck port, and plugged it in.

"What are you doing?" Daniel asked hoarsely. Peggy shoved a wad of tissues into his hand. He dabbed at his face, inadvertently scraping across a rough row of stitches. No wonder people kept looking at him like he was the walking dead.

"In theory," Jason said, working busily with the tool in one hand and a small wireless keyboard in the other, "I'm powering down the JK-1070 unit right now, and I'm going to restore it from backup."

"And ... that'll put everything back like it was," Daniel said hesitantly. He didn't want to believe, to hope. He had a brief, unpleasant vision of Jack's consciousness trapped in the dark, unaware of his surroundings, lost in an empty dark void of computer space. Logically, he knew it wouldn't be like that; if Jack had been recorded, it would be a sort of stasis, with everything unchanged. But he had to fight the urge to find that server and touch it to let Jack know he was here.

"If all goes well, yes," Jason said, studying his readouts. "Standard procedure is to power down and then do a complete backup as the very last step before reformatting, so this should return the JK-1070 -- Jack -- to exactly where it was. But its --"

"His," Daniel said, with a snap in his voice. At least it was better than the wet note of despair that had been there a few minutes earlier.

"His," Jason conceded. "His neural net is weird. The thing that could cause problems is if it's been _physically_ remapped by the reformatting, instead of just laying down a new program on top of the existing architecture."

"English, Wilkes," Daniel said. He could feel himself coming alive again, a tentative hope unfurling in his chest. Peggy pressed her shoulder against his.

"If there are physical changes, I might not be able to restore him without significant damage," Jason said. "But let's not borrow trouble, okay? The upload is going to take a little while."

"Define a little while." Daniel hardly felt his headache anymore, or any of the rest of it. He looked down at Jack's still face, and could almost imagine that he was sleeping, not dead.

"Half an hour or so?"

"I'll make coffee," Daniel declared. He turned in the general direction of where he'd seen sinks earlier, and nearly fell down.

"You will _lie down,"_ Peggy told him, and steered him to the nearest lab table. She helped him up onto it, and shoved a wadded-up lab coat under his head when he reluctantly consented to let her help him lie back.

He turned his head to the side. Jack was lying on the next table over, and it was almost possible to imagine they were both in adjoining hospital beds, one of them having stupidly gotten himself blown up, and the other ... well ...

_I need you back, so I can yell at you for doing something so wrongheaded. As if any CX or JX or any other model could ever protect me better than you could._

His eyelids drifted closed, with Jack the last thing he saw. Time skipped and then Peggy was nudging his shoulder, stirring him back into a strained, painful consciousness.

"We're waking him up," she whispered near his ear.

Daniel struggled weakly to sit up, failing until Peggy helped him swing his legs over the side of the lab table. She kept her hands on him, preventing him from jumping off the lab table as Jason fussed with the tools. The way the world kept swaying back and forth, it was probably just as well.

"Well?" he asked impatiently. Jack was stone-still, like a corpse. _Or a machine,_ Daniel thought, and squashed that part of his brain fiercely.

"Hang on," Jason said. "These readings are ... they're weird. Of course ..." He looked up with a slight grin. "His readings were always weird. They just don't fit any of the baselines. And these are completely strange, and not quite like what I have on record for him, but who the hell knows. His neurology is more like a human's; it changes all the time."

"So _wake him up,"_ Daniel said. He was wound up like a coiled spring, adrenaline pushing away the headache for the moment, or at least his awareness of it.

"I'm getting there." Jason reached behind Jack's ear.

Nothing happened, for just long enough for something in Daniel's chest to fold like a crushed paper cup ... and then Jack's eyes snapped open and there was a full-body flinch, rippling down the length of him.

"Jack." Daniel slid off the lab table and reeled on impact, barely aware of Peggy catching and steadying him. "Jack. Say something."

"I ..." Jack said, staring at the ceiling, with his agate eyes open -- but Daniel, as he stumbled towards him and caught himself on the edge of Jack's lab table, couldn't _see_ them properly, couldn't see what was in them. "I ... I am ..."

"If you say you're the JK-1070 and you're awaiting instructions, I will knock your fucking teeth out." The words tumbled out; he hardly registered them, because Jack's eyelids fluttered and he turned his head towards Daniel. 

Jack gazed at him for a long, still moment -- he didn't look blank so much as stunned -- and then he frowned. "Why aren't you in the hospital? Is this the same time, or did you get hurt _again?_ You look like shit."

Relief crashed on Daniel like a tidal wave. That was _Jack._ He'd know that dry sarcasm anywhere. He fell on Jack, gripping his shoulders, overcome with an urge to simultaneously punch the shit out of him (not that it would help; he'd probably break his hand) and kiss him until his own lips were bruised and bloody, and ... just ...

... just do what he did, which was hold on and bury his face in Jack's neck. He was aware of that faint, familiar smell, the smell of plastic and chemicals, the smell that would always be Jack to him.

"Fuck you," he choked out. "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you."

"Will someone _please_ tell me what is going on," Jack said over Daniel's head. His neck flexed against Daniel's cheek as he turned his head -- looking at Peggy, presumably, but Daniel wasn't going to raise his head or let go. Not right now. Possibly never. "How long has it been? I came in to get wiped --"

"I am going to kick your ass," Daniel said into his neck. "You're getting your ass kicked, you piece of absolute _shit."_

"I think you'd have to be ... not quite so close, first," Jack said, sounding a little uncertain. One of his hands settled on Daniel's hair, awkwardly petting, perhaps in an attempt to calm him down from what to Jack might seem like a human having an irrational, emotional fit.

Daniel was not about to explain it to him. Or let go.

"It's the same day," Peggy's voice said. It came from right over Daniel's head, so she was standing right there -- and then her hand settled on his back, warm and soothing and strong. "Daniel dragged himself out of the hospital in order to drag all of us down here as soon as he realized what had happened."

"You _died,"_ Daniel said into his neck. "You selfish piece of shit."

"Obviously I'm not dead, since I'm talking to you right now," Jack pointed out. "Can I sit up now? You're going to have to let go for that, by the way."

"No I'm not, I'm not going to, we had to restore you from _backup,_ you selfish fucker. They'd given you a new personality and everything. It looked at me and it wasn't you."

"Oh," Jack said, one small word, and he planted his hand beside Peggy's on Daniel's back.

"I hate you," Daniel told him, muffled by Jack's neck.

"Yes, I can tell, can I please ... Look, you're calling _me_ selfish." The familiar anger was starting to emerge, and Daniel thought, _Good._ He was spoiling for a screaming fight right now. "You call _me_ selfish, but you're the one who took the brunt of a blast meant for me, meant for _me_ when I can handle it about a hundred times better than you can -- when my entire purpose is protecting you. Who's selfish now, huh?"

"Yeah, so your solution is to come down here and commit suicide? Good job of protecting me, A-plus, that'll help a whole hell of a lot."

"You _fucker,_ " Jack said, his voice cracking, and he was holding Daniel with both arms now. "I just want to keep you safe. I'll gladly step down if someone else can do it better."

"It's not protecting me at all if you rip my _heart_ out in the process," Daniel snapped, digging his arms in, wrapping them around Jack's body on the metal slab. Jack was warm, though -- oh, he was warm, so warm. "Don't you ever, ever do anything like this again, or I'll kill you myself."

"Peggy, should he be out of bed?" Jack said over Daniel's head. His hand rubbed up and down, up and down on Daniel's spine. It hurt his cracked ribs but damned if he was going to tell Jack to stop.

"No," Peggy said in a tone that was burdened with a lot of emotions; dry amusement seemed to reign, however. "Any help in getting him back to his hospital bed is appreciated."

"I'm capable of carrying him."

"Yes," Peggy said. "Yes, that would be a very big help."

Still obstinately clinging, Daniel found himself tilted suddenly vertical, and thought, _Oh right, he really is that strong._ Jack swung his legs off the slab and picked up Daniel in a bridal carry.

"This is embarrassing," Daniel grumbled. Over Jack's shoulder, he saw Jason watching them with an expression very similar to the one Peggy had worn in the restaurant when he told her about Jack: a sort of stunned _Oh._

"It's your own fault," Jack told him. "What did he do, stage a jailbreak?" he asked Peggy.

"Yes," Peggy said succinctly. Her hand settled on Daniel's arm, and she moved along with them both as Jack took a step forward.

"With you driving the getaway car, probably," Jack said. "I trust you people to look out for him when I'm gone, and look what happens."

"I happened to approve of his mission," Peggy said, and she leaned in -- her hair brushed Daniel's face, and he felt her arm draw tight around him. She seemed to be hugging both of them.

And Daniel closed his eyes. He didn't even care what came next. All he wanted, all he needed was right here and now.

* * *

**Epilogue**

 

Daniel hit the concrete hard enough to knock the breath out of him and skidded across it, skinning his hands in the process.

"No, take the impact with the fake leg," Jack said from somewhere nearby, as Daniel struggled to get the air back into his lungs. "You can't land like that from higher up on a human leg or you'll shatter your knee."

"You mean I didn't?" Daniel groaned. He rolled over onto his back. Jack came into his field of vision, blocking the sun and smirking at him with an expression that also contained a hint of concern.

"You okay?"

"Fine." Daniel reached up to grip the offered hand, his palm still stinging and slightly sticky. Jack pulled him effortlessly to his feet.

It was one of Daniel's days off, and they were in a concrete cul-de-sac out back of the apartment building. There was a basketball hoop for pickup games, some chalk markings from kids' games scratched on the sidewalk, and right now a group of bored teenagers passing bottles of cheap beer back and forth while they sat on a scatter of overturned recycling bins and watched the show.

Jack had been working with Daniel on learning to make his artificial leg work for him in the field. No one had ever done this before; Daniel himself had always thought of it as a replacement for the leg he'd lost, not as a tool that could be used to do entirely new things.

But he already knew the leg was stronger than the one he'd been born with, and now Jack was helping him figure out new ways to use it, including longer jumps from much greater heights than Daniel considered sane or safe. The leg was built on the same base as the Synthetics' artificial bodies, so Jack had a better idea than most humans of what Daniel's leg was capable of.

He did tend to forget the leg was attached to fragile human flesh and bone, though.

"Hey, you," Jack said to the watching kids. "You there, with the rope."

"Me?" said the girl he'd addressed. She was about thirteen or fourteen, with a head of short, twisted dreadlocks.

"Yeah. Can we used your rope for a minute?"

"It's a ratchet tie," the girl said. "I found it by the road; it's mine. What'll you give me for it?" 

"A free show," Jack said with one of his easy, tossed-off grins. "If it breaks, I'll buy you a new one. If it doesn't break, I'll show you a cool trick."

The girl thought about it, and then unknotted the yellow canvas strap from around her waist; she was wearing it wrapped several times about her narrow waist like a belt. She tossed it to him.

Jack tested the strength of the strap between his hands, and then looked up the sun-baked concrete walls that formed this little dead-end between the buildings. He bent his knees and ran at the wall, jumped just as he got to it, and parkoured deftly up twenty feet or so to land on top of a narrow strip of roof jutting out over the Dumpsters in back of the building. There were a few oohs and ahhs from the kids.

As far as Daniel could tell, Jack really did like kids. Since he'd been staying at Daniel's building, he had quickly noticed that the alleys and cul-de-sacs out back of the buildings were a hangout for the local kids, and had started joining the teenagers occasionally to play basketball with them. Unlike the way he dealt with adults, he had never hidden his android status from the kids, and they were absolutely fascinated with him -- all the more so because he didn't ask them questions, not even their names. He just dropped in and out to play with them and answer questions about himself, if they were curious. By this point, Jack usually had a small entourage of curious kids hanging around him, at a cautious distance, whenever he went outside in the neighborhood.

Daniel still hadn't figured out if Jack was doing deliberate community outreach -- since Daniel had been doing more volunteering with Angie's group, he'd started thinking about things like that -- or if it was just something he did because he thought it was fun. In any case, even in the short time he'd been around, he had managed to engender more goodwill with the local teenagers than Daniel had thought possible.

He was staying at Daniel's building most nights now. Daniel had started taking all of his days off instead of covering other people's shifts if he could get away with it, and taking Jack with him. He was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but so far, Dooley seemed to be turning a blind eye to what was self-evidently going on under his nose. Daniel didn't think it was that the Chief didn't notice -- Dooley was much too sharp for that -- but rather that he'd picked up on a lot more of what was actually going on than most of the other detectives at the station. 

As for where it was all going in the future ... well, if there was one thing Daniel's life had taught him, it was not to worry too much about the things he couldn't change.

Jack dropped the yellow canvas strap over the side of the roof, weighted with the metal ratchet tie on the end. It swung three or four feet above the concrete. Daniel caught it to keep it from swinging, and looked up at him.

"What are you going to do, pull me up?"

"No, you're going to do what I just did, while holding onto this to keep yourself from falling if you slip."

"No _way,"_ one of the kids said, echoing Daniel's exact thoughts.

"Your leg has sophisticated sensors to plant itself in a stable foothold with adequate traction," Jack said, crouching on the roof's edge. "Why do you think you don't trip all the time, if you're walking around on a plastic foot? And it doesn't care if you're on level ground or not. It's just as happy to do the same thing on the wall. That's what I just did. You still can't _walk_ up walls, because gravity will pull you down, but you can _run_ as long as you keep moving fast enough to counter gravity. Your leg will help you."

"You're the one who goes on and on about how breakable I am," Daniel complained, knotting both hands in the end of the canvas strap. "You know if I miss a step or lose my grip, I could fall on my head and die, right?"

"I won't let you," Jack said, and he sounded so confident about it that Daniel couldn't find it in himself to argue with him.

Instead he gripped the end of the ratchet tie with all his strength and looked up at the impossibly high, impossibly sheer concrete wall. "I can't believe I'm doing this," he said, more to himself than to Jack's reckless grin. "On three?"

"One," Jack said.

"Two," Daniel gritted, holding onto the strap so hard his hands cramped.

He barely heard the "three"; he was already running at the wall. He jumped as he'd seen Jack do -- and Jack was _right,_ his artificial leg found purchase on the wall as if he was walking on flat ground. He leaped back and forth, with a couple of breathless near-misses as the sole of his left foot skidded on the wall, but the constant steady upward pressure on the ratchet strap kept him moving, and the next thing he knew Jack was hauling him over the edge of the roof, to the sound of claps and cheers from the kids underneath.

"Whoa," Daniel gasped. When he looked down, he couldn't believe how high up they were. The wall fell away in a sheer plunge. He'd run up that. It seemed impossible.

"See? Told you so." Jack kissed him quickly -- there were wolf whistles from below -- and helped him pry his cramped hands off the ratchet strap.

"I want to try!" the dreadlocked girl shouted up to them.

"You don't have a plastic leg," Jack said, looking over the edge at her. Several of the kids had drifted over to get a better look at the action. "You can't do what he just did, at least not yet, but I can show you a couple of parkour tricks that you _can_ do when we get back down."

"Sharp," one of the other kids said.

Daniel sighed, looking over the edge at the too-far concrete. "I would ask how we get down, but I have a bad feeling I already know the answer."

Jack laughed, but before he could say anything, a familiar voice called up, "Do I even want to know what you two are doing on the roof?"

Behind the chain-link fence separating the open side of the cul-de-sac from the street, Peggy and Angie had wandered up. After Daniel had introduced them, the two women had quickly become fast friends, and it wasn't uncommon for Angie to find time for lunch or socializing during Peggy and Daniel's off-duty time.

"We're training," Daniel called down.

"Being reckless idiots is more likely," Peggy said, ostensibly to Angie, but in a voice designed to carry.

"Well, come down from there," Angie called up. "I've got an hour before I have to be back at the office, and we were going to pick up takeout and meet Jason in a park he says is nice."

The city might be a labyrinth of concrete and freeways, but there were parks, and even unexpectedly pleasant outdoor spaces like this one. Daniel felt as if he'd explored more of the recreational parts of the city in the last couple of months than in his entire adult life before that.

"So get off the roof and come join us," Peggy said.

"Yeah ..." Daniel looked down at the drop below him. "There might be a problem with that."

Jack's hand closed around Daniel's, with his inhumanly strong, inhumanly warm grip. "Take your weight on your artificial leg," he said softly. "It'll be fine."

"You sure it won't pulverize my thigh?"

"The shock absorbers can take it. Believe me, I know." And Jack leaned over and kissed him, fast and sloppy, breaking into a grin in the middle of it so Daniel found himself kissing Jack's smile. When Jack pulled back, he looked wild and reckless and alive, his hair tousled and his face smudged with dirt from their mutual spills in the dusty cul-de-sac. "Trust me," he added.

"I do," Daniel said.

He turned away before he could see the impact of those words written across Jack's face, looking out instead at the city canyon in front of them. Jack's hand was warm in his. He tensed, feeling Jack moving with him, in perfect sync -- and he jumped.


End file.
